Universities

Guest post from Vitriol Girl 

I am a postgraduate at a very well-known Melbourne-based university. In general, my tertiary experience has been a rather positive one. It was, for example, the catalyst for my introduction to the Captain here—a privilege rarely afforded the lowly, unwashed masses. (Knowingly, anyway.) But the elation I get from a good thinking session or a tidy HD on a paper is rather overshadowed by the fact that the whole institution often feels completely disorganised and totally arbitrary.

Dealing with the university administration system, for example, is like being blindfolded at a party and told to hit the piñata. Only, the piñata is in another building, and so is the party for that matter, and it’s on a different day at a different time, and nobody told you because you weren’t at that unscheduled meeting in the faculty lounge last Friday at 3:37pm where all of this was discussed. They’ve also cancelled the cheese platter but there’s no point in coming anyway because the free champagne is only for professors and you’re just one of their lackeys.

By the way, emailing me five minutes before an event begins does not count as giving me notice.

Speaking of email, no, I haven’t filled out that survey about the inadequacy of the size of the car spaces for the Science Faculty because I don’t park there and I don’t care, I’ve never had anything to do with the Science Faculty and spamming me about it isn’t going to change that.

I’m so sorry I followed the instructions on that form and submitted it to the graduate school office like it told me to do. Next time I’ll completely ignore any written directives and make sure I annoy you with every piece of pointless documentation the system might require of me. Would you like to check over my Medicare claims and tax returns as well? I’ll even attach some passive-aggressive notes to them, just to keep things interesting. ‘Yours in anticipation’ indeed.

And why must the web enrolment system be formatted like a questionnaire from Quiz-Your-Friends? Don’t we have an entire department devoted to information technology? Surely they can come up with something better than highlighted bullet points on a glorified Word document.

Finally, I don’t know what part of ‘I want to have adventures’ sounds to you like ‘I want to sit in an office with a view of a carpark and teach Derrida to bored undergraduates for the rest of my life’ but that’s not what I said and that’s not what’s going to happen.

Don’t get me wrong, I understand the appeal of a room of one’s own and an adjustable desk chair as much as the next person, but I’ve never once considered the institution as a long-term career and I’m not going to start now. I have a life and I intend to live it.

Vitriol Girl blogs over here when she is trying to rescue her soul from her university