Results in and offer received!

It’s been a nail biting couple of weeks as I waited for the University to answer my mid year application into a Bachelor of Arts. A couple of days ago I got an email with my offer. This is epic news, failure to secure a place would have thrown things in disarray since I don’t have the money to fund another semester at full fee. It means I get a Commonwealth Supported Position, so a good chunk of my fees are paid by the government and the student contributions go on an interest-free loan to be paid back when I’m earning again. Oh, and I get a student discount for transport. Woo.

I completed my semester of subjects in the Community Access Program with very good marks, three H2As and one H1. I needed an average score of 70%, which I think is a H2B, so I had comfortably blasted it in. Of course I was conscious of the scores I needed to get so I didn’t mess around but the actual results were still something of a surprise. I would have thought it rather more likely to have attained a H1 for Philosophy, Politics and Economics or Intercultural Effectiveness (I got H2A for both), than the H2A I got for Chinese. The Chinese result just dwarfs any other possible concern.

There are considerable differences between the effort applied and the quality of the work as judged by myself. There is no doubt in my mind that the quality of work I submitted for Chinese wasn’t worth a H2A. However if you consider the effort I applied, well that’s H1. I this case I benefited from the subject difficulty and being scaled with my fellow students. For PPE and ICE, I’m perhaps a little surprised at the lack of a H1 (particularly ICE), but the subjects were pretty easy for me and I did pretty much sail it by the seat of my pants – choosing to divert my efforts towards Chinese.

I got a H1 for Literature and Performance. I’ve been writing professionally for a very long time, but a sort of dull technical descriptive writing. So when it became apparent that the markers for this subject wanted to read essays that were, hmm, flowery shall we say, entertaining at any rate – I responded to this well. I had to be very strategic with this subject, the reading workload was massive yet I still stumbled upon areas so fascinating I spent days reading and researching, Samuel Taylor Coleridge  for example. I spent far too much time researching and agonising and not enough time writing essays, but in retrospect I suppose that’s good.

My final essay was very difficult. As I read widely and constructed my argument I realised my preconception was wrong and turned it on its head. It was very difficult to weave in such rich and heavy recent lines of research and thought into an essay, realistically one shouldn’t do this – it should have happened earlier, been assimilated and discussed and then writing of a paper would be more natural. I blame journalist deadline mentality for that.

I had been under such spectacular pressure for Chinese, however, that I diverted all efforts towards that even to the point that I had to make a strategic decision to do an extra day cramming for a Chinese exam at the expense of handing in my major English essay a day late with a 2% penalty. I fluked that one nicely because I just scraped the H1 Lit & Perf result and just scraped the H2A Chinese result too. I definitely learned that I should at least read heavily through the semester on the subjects I think I’ll be writing about. I definitely do my best work when I’m able to just write rather than needing to go off and research again.

I feel sad for Lit & Perf because I enjoyed it so much, I wish I had just a couple of spare subjects so I could keep my hand in. It’s the only subject which felt remotely “art” like in my studies. I landed a part time job writing technical stuff for an old mag in the UK. This is a great relief as far as finances are concerned but this sort of web browsing, paraphrasing, technical slapdash stuff isn’t writing at all really. If I write something good, or something really bad (with shit grammar and typos), no one is any the wiser really. Oh well, a job is a job!