Hi Nick! 
How did you find the university workload compared to year 12?
Howdy! I found it different, and less time-consuming. So much less time-consuming, actually, that I really struggled to deal with the transition from Year 12 to first-year uni for quite some time. I don't think I really felt comfortable at my second year at the absolute earliest. Lots of things were different: class structure, work expectations, time commitments, independence, new location, new people etc.
For most of my degree (Arts), I had probably anywhere between 8-15 contact hours per week, which is very low relative to other degrees. That means 8-15 formally structured classes (lectures, tutorials etc.), but practically none of the lectures had compulsory attendance. I usually only had classes scheduled for 2-3 days per week.
This was good and bad. Good in the sense that I had a fair bit of time available to study independently. I'd have to say I used the time pretty well, usually studying on campus when I wasn't working or doing other things. My opinion is that you could probably pass my degree without investing heaps of hours into it, but doing really well in each specific unit takes quite a lot of time.
But it was also bad in that I felt I'd lost a lot of the structure I had through Year 12. Through high school, I felt like I was working toward something (final exams/ATAR), worked really hard, had school five days per week, had familiar teachers and friends, and so on. I didn't have any of that at uni, and honestly started to unravel a bit until I started to re-build that structure. My first semester at uni was definitely the hardest for me, and then my next semester.
In my fourth year, I was doing Honours. For the first semester, I had a couple of classes, and in the second semester, I was exclusively writing my thesis. This was my favourite year of all, and really got me excited about academia (I'm a little more jaded now but still think I'll return to academia at some point, for some reason, studying some subject - all to be confirmed haha).
Anyway, to answer your question, it wasn't really the workload that I found difficult - more everything else that came with the transition to uni. But my circumstances were very different to a lot of other people's. Some people would have had 3-4 times as many contact hours as I had, just based on what they were studying. I found Arts quite independent (lots of readings, lots of self-study, lots of essays), whereas other fields are more dependent on labs and additional classes, further to assignments. My partner studied Medicine, and their uni experience was definitely very different to mine. So I think it's quite field-specific.
Also, I've heard that it's harder to make friends in uni because there's so many people. Do you have to put a lot of energy into creating social connections?
Good question. I made virtually no (lasting) friendships until Honours. In my first three years, all of my classes were quite big. That is, typical university lecture theatres (hundreds of people), pretty good anonymity as a student, and no incidental contact with people through the day as you have with school. Classes were 12 weeks long, and not everybody attends every lecture, so it was difficult for me to make ongoing relationships, even if I managed a good chat with somebody in a specific week.
Tutorials are more conducive to friend-making, because they're smaller in student numbers (talking more like 10-20 students from my experience), and more like a classroom/discussion setup that you're probably familiar with. But with Arts, there are so many subjects to choose from (which is great for flexibility) that it's not uncommon to go through an entire degree and never have class with the same people again. One of my friends studied the same degree at the same university, and we only had one subject together across the three years - and that was only because we specifically designed it that way.
Honours was different because I had a cohort. From memory, there were 8 of us going through the same thing across the year, so it was a very different dynamic. The other difference with Honours was that I actually started to take initiative a bit. For most of uni, I actively avoided units that contained group-work, I never attended any social events, and didn't really
try to make friends in all honesty. In my last year, I volunteered quite a lot (and even went on a camp as part of this, which is so horrendously unlike me haha), got a little bit more involved with LingSoc (Linguistics Society), and just enjoyed campus life a bit more.
Some people make dozens of friends from their first semester and don't slow down from there. Others (like me) don't. But it's probably one of those things where the more you try, the more you get out of the whole thing. I didn't try to get involved, I didn't push myself out of my comfort zone, and I didn't actively try to make friends for the first three years, but I have no doubt my experience would have been entirely different if I started uni with a different attitude.
P.S. I think my attitude actually changed a bit at the end of my third year, when I was on exchange in Malaysia. I had quite a lot of time to think, and thought I should really try to make the most of Honours - and I did!
Have you drifted apart from friends you were close with in highschool?
Thank you!
For sure, but that's probably to be expected. I graduated in 2012, so I'm now seven years out, which is actually longer than the amount of time I was at high school (that was a super weird realisation to make - not sure how I feel about it haha). But that's quite a long time, and a lot of my friends from high school have now moved interstate or overseas, have full-time jobs, are married etc.
I still keep in contact with a few (my partner and best friend mostly). It's just a lot harder without having the commonality of school, and seeing them 200 days per year. There are many I'd be more than happy to catch up with over coffee - it's just logistically a challenge.
About 15 or so of us went out for dumplings the other month. It was quite surreal. I hadn't seen some of these people since Year 12, but it felt like not much had changed.
I drifted a bit socially through high school, too, so didn't have an obvious group until nearer the end, so that probably plays into things, too. To my understanding there are still several groups from my year level who are super tight and catch up regularly.
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Topic: Nick's Ask Me Anything (Read 5882 times)