It’s time I posted something, seeing as Sunny’s put up three of her own already while I’ve been enjoying a weekend holiday on the Gold Coast. Ahh, sunny Queensland winters. (In case you were wondering: Sunny is currently in the University of Melbourne, while I’m in the University of Queensland. Explore the About pages, linked on the top and on the right of the home page.)
So. First year. It’s transition, in many senses of the word: you’re leaving the uniform-and-timetable affair of secondary school, you may be going to a different place from most of your friends, you may be leaving home or the country altogether. Quite naturally, the first year experience isn’t going to be a breeze, especially if you’re starting uni overseas, without many family members or friends around, and you’re going to a “western” culture from a “typical” asian one. There’s so much you can say about the first year, so I’ll do a relatively quick impression of the whole experience. In a bunch of words though: drifting, freedom, loneliness, independence.
On the whole, I had a relatively smooth entry into university. (See Sunny’s first year[s].) I had the luck of knowing what I wanted to major in and ultimately get a degree in. It helps a damn great deal to know what you want to study, and the earlier the better. It’s tough choosing courses/programs. (An aside: I recently met up with an old primary-through-to-secondary school friend who’d been almost always at the bottom of the class, smoking, skipping classes, fooling around a lot; but who’d had the ambition of being a pilot since he was eight. Now he’s almost got his pilot license, flying regularly, perfectly content and independent with his own car and home. I’d say that if you’ve got some general career you’re pretty interested in when you’re in your mid-teens, you should go ahead and explore it further, and see if you can imagine yourself studying/working in it in future.)
And then it was also good that I’d spent the previous two years away from home already, and in a junior college system that worked with lectures and tutorials. So I knew what it was like to pick your own subjects, have a strange-looking timetable (with several-hour long gaps between classes), and to despair over losing your milk to the hostel’s thieving fridge-raiders.
But first year is so many other things too. I was going to a country I hadn’t lived in since I was 8, and was therefore pretty foreign to me, and I was going to be studying English Literature and therefore be almost definitely the only Asian student from overseas (not an “ABC“) in the class – and some of my subjects, which the online enrolment system told me were compulsory, required me to actively participate in tutorials (oh no! I had to speak in class? Horrors!!**). And then I was going back to living with family (plus an infamous grandmother) – which ironically was more stressful than living away from home. I’ll talk more on the coming-back-home syndrome another time. Basically though, there are a lot of worries to cope with, some that linger on even now in the middle of my second year, such as how to balance being “asian” and “australian” at the same time – I find that especially troubling, since I work with almost entirely Caucasian people.
Note that I don’t intend to be racist. I’m just stating what is absolutely obvious: that there is a huge gap between the western and asian cultures and trying to cross it can leave you stranded in between without stable ground to stand on.
Back on topic – the best thing about starting uni was that there were all these people who liked the same subject area I did, and were willing to engage in enthusiastic, intelligent discussion about it. Fantastic! The first day of classes was a blast. I looked around at all the hundred or so, mostly young, generally excited students and this unshaven, barefooted, bespectacled professor in the lecture theatre (PHIL1010, Introduction to Philosophy, for curiosity’s sake) and thought: damn, this is exactly what I thought it’d be like: people from various backgrounds coming together to discuss a common subject of interest, and take the discussion wherever their minds took it, with only slight guidance by the tutor/lecturer. No more limitations to the textbook, no more fixed topics, no more stop-talking-in-class, no more being embarrassed to raise your hand in class. Woohoo! Freedom! It was worth the loneliness of realising that coming fresh from overseas and then living with family and not renting a place with other housemates, makes finding a good friend almost certainly impossible.
The loneliness is the only thing marring my uni experience, really. I drift from class to class, subject to subject, course to course, and semester to semester meeting and forgetting people, simply because of the few class hours you share (in Literature, and most Arts courses anyway. With the sciences and business, you tend to get more groupwork, and therefore more chance of forming a closer bond with other students). The drifting has its upside and downside: the good being that you can pick your own subjects and timetable, and the bad being that you don’t have enough time to know people that well. There’s the simple solution of moving out to share a house/flat with other people of course, or finding work, or joining a club; and that all depends on how much time and money you have, which I’m still trying to sort out.
And of course, all these things are usually all your own problems, which you solve by yourself, independently. So I discovered. It’s exciting and empowering being able and capable to become self-sufficient without anyone else’s help but your own, and to study anything you want (almost, see Sunny’s posts on subject selection and frequently useless faculty staff. I’ll rant about them too sometime later). But it’s also lonely.
Possibly the best scenario for a beginning uni student, is to enrol with a bunch of friends, or make sure you’re staying out with people who look like they might become close friends with you, or befriend your fellow firstyears as quickly as possible. If that sounds predatory, let me tell you that my own uni life would be as close to perfect as I want, if I had my best friends with me right now.
Then again, since ages ago, people have been writing about how life is essentially lonely, and aimless. I suppose you can’t quite say you’ve lived life until you’ve suffered through it a bit. Nothing without effort, eh? And as Sunny has said, greener grass! Get to the greener grass!
**You get much better at it. Trust me 
After three semesters, I’m not just regularly contributing to the discussion at each tute, but I actually look forward to giving the occasional seminar presentation. And courses tend to build up toward that aim: of initiating, inspiring and maintaining your own discussions and theories and theses, rather than simply answering questions. But a lot more on subjects, and course structures, in an other post. This “overview” has gone on long enough! 
