Ask The University of Melbourne

[Auralee]

Apologies in advance if this has been answered previously. Can you blame me though for not wanting to sift through the other fifty-odd pages? lol

Anyway. I'm just really confused with this whole 'levels' thing for subjects - particularly for breadth. What I do understand is the levels are indicative of difficulty. What I don't understand I suppose is whether it's okay to say, in first year, maybe look at some level 2 subjects which honestly appeal to me more than the level 1 subject I've got in mind.

I'm looking at a subject called Romanticism, Feminism and Revolution which has some really good classic books that I would love to sink my teeth into. Only thing is, it's a level 2. Is there some logical order of subjects that I am missing or supposed to do? (e.g. lvl 1,2 then 3) Will I be out of my depths as a first year biomedicine student with no prior experience in 'writing essays for university'?

[literally lauren]

Apologies in advance if this has been answered previously. Can you blame me though for not wanting to sift through the other fifty-odd pages? lol

Anyway. I'm just really confused with this whole 'levels' thing for subjects - particularly for breadth. What I do understand is the levels are indicative of difficulty. What I don't understand I suppose is whether it's okay to say, in first year, maybe look at some level 2 subjects which honestly appeal to me more than the level 1 subject I've got in mind.

I'm looking at a subject called Romanticism, Feminism and Revolution which has some really good classic books that I would love to sink my teeth into. Only thing is, it's a level 2. Is there some logical order of subjects that I am missing or supposed to do? (e.g. lvl 1,2 then 3) Will I be out of my depths as a first year biomedicine student with no prior experience in 'writing essays for university'?

This question seemed vaguely English related, so I have been summoned from my slumber.

The levels things don't necessarily correspond with difficulty, it's just that 'Level 2' units tend to be taken in 2nd year by students who have already done the Level 1 background. However, if there are no formal prerequisites, which there aren't for RFR, then you should be fine to pick it up on a whim or as a breadth.

Some people do breadth tracks whereby they go from Level 1 - 3 over the course of their degree, so if you wanted to, you could do a few Level 1 essay writing subjects and see how you go. But if you'd rather just do RFR and fill your breadth slots with other random interests like I did, that's also fine.

With regards to this subject in particular, I don't think you'll be out of your depth at all because a) a lot of people do Level 2/3 English subjects without the Level 1 experience, both as Arts students and from other disciplines, so the staff and assessment usually cater to these different skill levels, and b) that subject is taught by Tom Ford this year who is probably the best person in the whole department (in my admittedly limited and perhaps not wholly representative opinion, but see my review of Gothic Fictions which he took last year for more details).

The only potential trouble you may face is that because this subject only has two pieces of assessment, you don't want to go in all overconfident and end up getting a less than desirable mark on the first essay, because it's very hard to recover in the next one, and that won't be a reflection on your skill so much as indicative of some problems that plague English subjects at UoM. The assessment breakdown is one of the biggest, but it can be circumvented if you're prepared to work at it.

I'd recommend talking to your tutor in the first week or two, either after class one day or in their office hours if they prefer, and just be like 'sup, I'm a biomed kid but I'm really interested in this subject - just wanted to know if we could chat about essay expectations and how I should approach things because I haven't done a tertiary lit subject before.' You may want to talk to them about referencing too, if that isn't something you've experienced in other subjects (...idk the first thing about biomed other than the fact that I'm jealous of your library). Also if your tutor isn't Tom Ford then I'd recommend changing tutorials, if possible Alternatively, you could go and see him since he's more likely to give you a decent answer, though because your tutor will be the one marking you, they're preferences should take precedence.

I know resources and reference points for English are few and far between, and I haven't actually done RFR, but let me know if you have any follow up questions and I'll try and help out

[Auralee]

Thank you Lauren for your insight! I think it might be a good idea to take a level 1 English subject (at least for first semester) so I can test the waters a little bit. When I have more time, I'll definitely go and check out your reviews for those subjects. I don't suppose you could recommend a good level 1 subject that might be in the same vein as RFR?

Thanks again

edit: I feel bad that I can't return the favour of a mini-essay  I will definitely take what you said on board!

[literally lauren]

Thank you Lauren for your insight! I think it might be a good idea to take a level 1 English subject (at least for first semester) so I can test the waters a little bit. When I have more time, I'll definitely go and check out your reviews for those subjects. I don't suppose you could recommend a good level 1 subject that might be in the same vein as RFR?

Thanks again

edit: I feel bad that I can't return the favour of a mini-essay  I will definitely take what you said on board!

There are only two Level 1 English subjects: Lit and Performance and Modern and Contemporary Literature, and if I were you, I'd let your text preferences dictate your decision

Lit&Perf. Texts

Romeo and Juliet - Shakespeare
Othello - Shakespeare
Romantic Poetry - Wordsworth, Blake, Byron et. al.
Pride and Prejudice - Austen
Great Expectations - Dickens
Jane Eyre - Bronte
A Doll’s House - Ibsen
The Cherry Orchard - Chekov

ModCon Texts

To the Lighthouse - Woolf
The Waste Land - Eliot
Waiting for Godot - Beckett
Dubliners - Joyce
After the quake - Murakami
The Catcher in the Rye - Salinger
Ariel - Plath

Having done both of them in 2014, I'd argue Lit&Perf was coordinated better and had higher quality lecturers overall, though I found the ModCon texts more fun to write on. However, if your priority is seeking clarity in assessment, either subject will do since the assessment is identical for both of them (i.e. one short essay that's basically a Lit. passage analysis; one essay that's basically an English Text Response based on a prompt, and one comparative piece at the end of semester where you compare what to texts have to say about a certain idea).

I'd probably recommend Lit&Perf though since they were way clearer about the assessment expectations and easing you into the process since it's a Level 1 Semester 1 subject, so it's very much got that 'high-school-to-uni' transition vibe that made things a lot smoother.

Unfortunately it's kind of just the luck of the draw in terms of getting a decent tutor though, so I know I joked about it before, but you might legitimately want to move tutorials in the first week or so if your seems less than helpful.

But there's a different set of problems with taking an Arts/ essay writing subject as a breadth for the first time and taking an English subject for the first time, so you could just do a first year Philosophy/ Anthropology/ Gender Studies/ Sociology/ Media subject if they sound more interesting, and that'd help you familiarise yourself with the tertiary essay writing process in general before you tackled a Level 2 English one. In all honesty, if you approach it diligently and are prepared for a bit of steep learning curve, English subjects really aren't as difficult as some lecturers like to make them out to be

Secret Life of Language is also utterly brilliant, though that has little to do with English or essay writing; I just thought I'd do my requisite pimping out of the Linguistics department here today :3

There's also this thing which may or may not be useful - it's mostly jargon and basic stuff but there is some decent advice in there.
You can even book an SAS thing where they'll appoint someone (usually a graduate level student in the area you're studying) to sit down with your and go through your work. I've never done this before but a few friends have found it useful in the past, so that's always a good back up plan if you're really uncertain about things

[Maz]

how much does it cost to live on campus? 

[literally lauren]

Depends where you want to stay. The 2015 Residency costs are here, which should give you some idea.

There's also a table here of various other costs if you're looking into share-housing or other options.

[Maz]

Depends where you want to stay. The 2015 Residency costs are here, which should give you some idea.

There's also a table here of various other costs if you're looking into share-housing or other options.

Thankyou

[dankfrank420]

If you achieve a 65%+ average at Uni Melb, are you guaranteed a CSP place in their postgrad engineering program provided you did the correct undergrad sequence?

[dankfrank420]

Yep!

Thanks!

[heart]

Thanks!

Students who complete an undergraduate degree at the University of Melbourne and achieve a weighted average mark of 65% in the final two years (by 2019).

Source: http://futurestudents.unimelb.edu.au/admissions/high_achievers_programs/graduate-course-guarantees/other_graduate_course_guarantees_without_ATAR

[harvey_specter]

Any idea when the enrolments deadlines are for units? I've accepted my offer, but can't find anything about dates online.

[Stevensmay]

Any idea when the enrolments deadlines are for units? I've accepted my offer, but can't find anything about dates online.

http://students.unimelb.edu.au/admin/enrolment/dates

Friday the 11th of March is the last day to enroll in subjects. Your offer will most likely have a different expiry on it though.

[Auralee]

Okay so I'm a little disappointed because I'm having trouble finding subjects that fit with my timetable for breadth. Which I find slightly annoying because the whole point of breadth is doing something to expand your horizons a bit, right?

As a biomedicine student keen to tap into subjects from the ARTS faculty (creative writing, lit and performance etc) I just CANNOT find any breadth that I actually WANT to do that will coincide with my existing timetable (which for the most part is 'locked in' because of the nature of the compulsory biomedicine subjects). Does anyone have any advice on who I should talk to at the university? I honestly just feel like calling up and asking them to TELL me which breadth subjects are realistic for me, because at the moment I've been doing a bit of trial and error. I have unenrolled and re-enrolled in things that many times that it's making me very stressed.

[literally lauren]

Okay so I'm a little disappointed because I'm having trouble finding subjects that fit with my timetable for breadth. Which I find slightly annoying because the whole point of breadth is doing something to expand your horizons a bit, right?

As a biomedicine student keen to tap into subjects from the ARTS faculty (creative writing, lit and performance etc) I just CANNOT find any breadth that I actually WANT to do that will coincide with my existing timetable (which for the most part is 'locked in' because of the nature of the compulsory biomedicine subjects). Does anyone have any advice on who I should talk to at the university? I honestly just feel like calling up and asking them to TELL me which breadth subjects are realistic for me, because at the moment I've been doing a bit of trial and error. I have unenrolled and re-enrolled in things that many times that it's making me very stressed.

Instead of having to enrol, unenrol, and re-enrol in a bunch of different subjects, you can just refer to the Master Timetable and see which subjects have viable time slots. Unfortunately you'll have to enrol to check tutorial slots, but you should be able to narrow some things down depending on what's available.

If you go and talk to someone at the student centre, they might be able to go through a list of viable options with you, but you could probably do the same thing yourself just by looking at all the level 1 breadths that pertain to your areas of interest. You can use this thing (which lets you select what course you're doing in order to bring up breadth options in other disciplines, and select by level so you can just find the L1 stuff) or you can look into the following subject codes which are pretty much the only options for Level 1 Arts in the creative writing realms:

Codes:

Semester 1:
ENGL10002 - Literature and Performance
MECM10003 - Media and Communications
LING10002 - Intercultural Communications
SCRN10001 - Introduction to Cinema Studies
SOCI10001 - Understanding Society

Semester 2:
ENGL10001 - Modern and Contemporary Literature
CWRI10001 - Creative Writing: Ideas and Practice
CULS10005 - Media, Identity, and Everyday Life
AHIS10002 - Modern Art: Politics of the New
ANTH10001 - Anthropology: Studying Human Diversity

Your other options include:

- choosing something totally different just for this semester (e.g. a music breadth, a UNIB subject, a summer/winter intensive if you only want to do 3 subjects this semester - a great option if you've already got a hectic timetable) and then pick up a more ideal creative writing/ literature-related subject in Semester 2. I actually did something similar just because I needed to complete a Level 1 Arts discipline subject, but found most of them really tedious since the 'Intro to ___' stuff was always so boring. So I just did Level 2 subjects in first year, Level 2 subjects in third year, and am now in the position where I'm going back and just choosing any random subjects in History or Philosophy just to get my Level 1 quota up. (Join me in HIST10007 if you want - it looks cool!)
Uou can expand your horizons in many different directions over the course of your degree, if you want. My first breadth was about Genetics, and the second about Cultural Forensics (analysing stolen artworks and learning how to spot a fake ) so there's really no incentive to have a consistent breadth track unless you're really set on doing a chain of English/Creative Writing subjects.

- choose a breadth at Level 2 or 3 if those ones are more interesting or more viable fits for your current timetable. Most of the creative writing subjects could be picked up without any background experience since they all pertain to different things (short story writing, playwriting, creative non-fiction, etc.)

- underload this semester, and overload next semester with two breadth subjects (not recommended unless you've got no other choice - an intensive subject for a week or two mid-year would be preferable to a whole semester of overloading, usually)

- enrol in a subject like Lit and Performance of Creative Writing anyway, and just don't go to lectures (assuming they're the inconveniences.) Listen to the recordings online, and just find yourself a tutorial slot that suits you. This also isn't something I'd recommend, but in reality, recording should suffice, and (for English subjects at least) the lectures tend to be information dumps about the important facets of the text you're studying that week, and it's the tutorials where you actually unpack the ideas and discuss them in a way that's helpful to the essays you'll write.

Hope that helps!

[Auralee]

Thank you Lauren again for your assistance! I'll have a look at some of your suggestions to see if any of them will fit in with my current time table. Cultural forensics sounds cool actually, and the Understanding Society one. I don't have my heart set on anything, more just frustrated that I can't seem to find anything to slot into my time table.

xo