It’s not just me!

Into my second week of my second semester and really enjoying it. I’d enjoy it a lot more if I had enough time to do actually study in the way I’d like but my part-time job is really chewing my time up. I now have rather a lot more sympathy for the plight of students than I did before.

Anyway, one of the most interesting developments is that there’s actually another mature student in not one but two of my subjects. We have somewhat similar interests, picking up a subject on Asia and we’re both majoring in linguistics, but she’s interested in the middle east. Today we were having a coffee in a break between lectures and got to talking about tutorials. She said she had a tutorial and it was awful (it’s her first semester so this is all brand new), no one would speak! So she ended up doing a bunch of the talking and then got the impression that the tutor was annoyed with her.

Haha, you’ve no idea what it means to hear that because I expected precisely the same thing. It’s not like I particularly crave hanging out with people closer to my own age, although I suppose there has to be an element of truth, it’s more that talking to another mature student allows me to figure out what’s me and what is more universal. We’ve had a jolly old time talking about lecturer’s poor use of power point, how irritating some of the kids are in talking in lectures and so on.

Also, I think it’s about the first time I’ve actually been able to talk to another student on campus that is genuinely interested in what we’re studying and able to relate it into what they want to do… I’m assuming this will improve as I progress and things start thinning out a little into specialisations. I didn’t quite realise how oddly lonely the campus was for me last semester until I had it contrasted with something more normal. I feel an inclination towards communicating more with academic staff than fellow students but that doesn’t extend to any social contact because of the undergrad/teacher divide.