As the end of semester draws near and the stress levels rise, if you’re anything like me you’ll be holding on by the tips of your fingernails. Complacency and exhaustion set in. You may have missed lectures in order to work frantically on that essay that is due tomorrow or just catch up on some much needed zzz’s and suddenly you’re well behind and feeling very overwhelmed…
Today I went to Melbourne with 3 of my fellow leadership mates from FedUni to attend a workshop on student leadership at universities. It was really rewarding and I was proud to be able to represent FedUni as a student leader.
After the train trip to Melbourne and a quick coffee from a cafe, we went up to the City Campus of Latrobe University to meet with the other participants in the workshop and share in the fruit and danishes that were kindly provided for breakfast. Continue reading Cath goes to the National Study Leadership Workshop
A few weeks ago, I was moving an exercise machine a little too enthusiastically and, as we brought it around a corner, it dinted the wall.
Continue reading Studying with Cats AKA ANTI-STUDY DEMONS OF DEATH
Motivation is something that I really struggle with. Or rather, my motivation is one of the things that depression has stolen from me.
This is super unhelpful in all walks of life; Amelia has highlighted how important motivation is. I find it particularly hard when it comes to University since, as we all know, Uni is all about self-driven study. No one is standing over our shoulders telling us we need to attend every class, or when we need to start our assignments or study for our tests. If we don’t want to go to our lectures or our tutorials, we don’t go.
I’m back, baby!
As is everyone else! University has started, the students are singing, the lecturers are giving their wisdom, and (quite importantly) the cafeteria is cooking. But today, I want to tell of an experience that I had a few weeks ago, because it was fun. You see, I’m a student at the Mt Helen campus in Ballarat. In preparation for work with the ASK service this year, a few of us (Ryan, Tegan, Lily and I to be exact) from the Mt Helen campus went down to the campus in Churchill (Gippsland) to meet up with all of the awesome Student Leaders there, so we could all do some training. I’d never been to the campus myself, despite hearing a lot about it and even telling others about it myself (oops)!
So, it was a Tuesday, ahhh I remember it well. Lily was to meet us down there, via train. For the rest of us, we took a FedUni car down (after packing it with supplies and enjoying the awesome fingerprint scanner set up to authorise key use). To gauge Ballarat to Churchill, it’s roughly a 3.5 hour drive, if traffic is on your side. It was a great car trip — Ryan and Tegan are as interesting people as you’d ever meet! I distinctly remember at one point looking up from the back seat and seeing 3 men in a truck all staring down at the car. I gave them the thumbs up and the weirdest face I could and watched them laugh as they took an exit off the highway. A moment I will cherish forever!
Editor’s note: I had no idea that this happened. I’m going to have to keep a closer eye on Cam.
One of the main reasons that I’m writing this post though, apart from the great company and experience of the trip, is how beautiful the FedUni campuses are, Churchill being no exception. Churchill is a relatively small town and yet the FedUni campus there is astonishingly big and spectacular! We got there and parked in the residency area, having rooms booked for the night for the training on the Wednesday. Now, though, we needed to find the keys, and that’s pretty hard to do when only one of you has been to the campus and it was a year ago. But we managed to walk through the campus (admiring it as we went) and find FedUni Living. Because it was after hours, we needed to call Campus Security.
That’s when we met Antonio. Antonio is just about the greatest bloke you’ll ever meet, hands down. He showed up within minutes, grabbed the keys, and offered us a lift back to the accommodation. His car was silent as a mouse — all electric. When we got out of the car and looked away for a split second, it was 100m up the road already! But that wasn’t the last we’d hear of Antonio..
We got settled in the apartments, and soon realised one of the smoke alarms seemed to be going off. So what did we do? We gave Antonio a call. He came back and helped us out with that. He even searched for half an hour for bug spray around the uni for us after hours. I don’t want to be too bold here, but I think Antonio may have just been the greatest person in the world. And so, thanks to him, we were settled and comfy in the our rooms for the night, one room each. After that, we went to get Lily from the train station in the nearby town of Morwell. Then we went out for tea in Traralgon! It was a great time to relax after the long drive of the day, of which I actually drove nothing. But who’s counting…? After a quick game of Love Letter (Ryan and Tegan teaching Lily and I), we headed to bed back on res, set to rise bright and early.
Editor’s note: the game ‘Love Letter’ isn’t as weird or seedy as it might sound. It’s perfectly tame. What Cam is also neglecting to tell you is that he loved it so much he actually endeavoured to make his own copy, which he brought in a week later and proudly showed us. But it’s entirely work-appropriate. You know what? I think I’m making this worse. I’m just going to let Cam continue.
In the morning we headed over to the campus, a little more familiar this time, grabbed some breakfast, and headed over to meet the PASS leaders in Churchill for the first time. Oh yes, we met Dean and Aaron and Aimee and Mark and Chris, just to name a few. Without going into the specifics of training, we certainly worked together to come up with the best way to help students — that’s you guys. There’s a multitude of resources that FedUni provides, just waiting to be used, and as students of the ASK service, we are here to help any way we can.
After training, we parted ways and the four of us from humble Mt Helen headed back, unfortunately cutting through peak hour in Melbourne, but making it home without a worry in the world.
That is, what I can honestly say, training well spent.
-Cam
I’m sure most of you have heard about Ballarat’s gold rush history but how many of you know that Ballarat is still producing gold? Not many of you? Don’t feel bad; most of my fellow students that study mining engineering don’t know that there is an operating gold mine right under their noses. The reason I bring it up is that I recently worked in the Ballarat Gold Mine to gain experience in my future profession. When I tell people that I’ve been working in Ballarat Mine, I usually get asked a number of questions so I thought I’d make a list of FAQs.
Question 1: “Oh, Ballarat mine? Do you mean Sovereign Hill?”
Answer: No I don’t mean Sovereign Hill! The Ballarat gold project is hidden away just off Geelong road and not far from the theme park but we don’t dress up in 1800s inspired clothes for obvious safety reasons.
Question 2: “How deep is it?”
Answer: The mine is over 650m below the surface of Ballarat and runs below Bakery Hill McDonalds. That might seem really deep but compared to most underground mines across the world, it’s actually pretty shallow.
Question 3: “Sooooo…….do you dig with a pickaxe?
Answer: No. As much as I would love to recreate a couple of scenes from Zoolander, it’s much easier to use explosives to break up the rock. I know, pretty cool right?
Question 4: “What hours do you work?” (people don’t ask this question but I bring it up anyway to get sympathy)
Answer: 12 hours a day for seven days. One week on and then one week off switching between day shift and night shift. Nothing makes 8:30 lectures look better than spending half your day underground.
Question 5: “Is it scary?”
Answer: Nah. I’m really tough. But seriously, mining is definitely not for everyone. If you’re claustrophobic or scared of the dark, you’re going to have a bad time.
Even then, some people are completely fine with going underground up until the point that they actually go underground and then subsequently freak out.
The thing that I find most interesting is that even after more than 150 years, the industry that put Ballarat on the map and started FedUni (which was originally the School of Mines Ballarat), is still going strong.
-Pat
Hellooooooo my lovely little kittens!
Have you heard of the PASS program? Well, you should have because it’s brilliant. PASS stands for Peer Assisted Study Sessions, and they are basically fun and casual study sessions for more difficult courses, run by an experienced student who has done well in that course in the past. And guess what? You could be that experienced student!
Yep, you heard me right. Applications to become next year’s PASS leaders are now open. Excited yet? You should be. Basically, if you have at least a high credit average across your degree, and have received at least a distinction in the course you wish to be a PASS leader in, then you should apply! It would also help if you are great at communicating and interacting with other people, particularly other students, and you have some form of organisational skills. Yes, unfortunately you will have to be at least slightly organised. Sorry, friends.
So what does being a PASS leader involve? Well, I’m glad you asked. If you are a PASS leader, you will run between one to three PASS sessions a week in your course. You will need to organise activities and/or things to do based on the course content that has been studied that week or is more difficult for students to understand, in order to help students learn in different and more interesting ways. One of the most important things to remember is that, as a PASS leader, you are not a teacher, and you shouldn’t give the students the answers but rather facilitate discussion and other ways in which the students can find the answers themselves. You will also be required to attend training, which will probably occur in February. Oh, and of course you get paid. Because money is always good, especially for us struggling uni students.
More information about becoming a PASS leader and application forms can be found here.
To check if PASS runs in a course you have completed and done well in, check this semester’s timetables here (be aware that some courses may change next year).
If you have any questions or need any extra information that you could not find at the link above, contact: studentfutures@federation.edu.au
-Tegan
Just yesterday I was organising a study session over Facebook with a friend. We both have to write a script, and I was feigning enthusiasm, so I typed ‘Do you want to meet up tomorrow to write scriiiiiiiipts?’ and hit enter. When I looked back at what I’d written, though, my sentence read:
Do you want tome up tomorrow to write scrimpiest?
… What?
Scrimpiest? Seriously? What does that word even mean? And how on earth does that sentence make more sense than what I had written?
You see, this is where autocorrect’s logic totally escapes me. How do you take ten ‘i’s followed by p-t-s and decide that I obviously meant to push i-m-p-i-e-s-t? It seems to me as though autocorrect thinks it knows way better than us, but it’s not actually very good at…anything. Except taking a bunch of random letters and turning it into an almost-word. I’m kind of tempted to just start mashing the ‘g’ key and see what word it decides I possibly meant to type.
And of course, this issue is just as present in assignments, especially when you’re studying something with its own terminology. Suddenly, your essay on paleomagnetism becomes a detailed thesis about ‘pale imagination’. Or the dreaded American English dictionary decides half our ‘s’s are meant to be ‘z’s.
For me, it’s become so bad that, if autocorrect decides it has to have some input, it becomes nearly impossible to go with what I originally typed. I hit space. It changes the word. I hit backspace and press space again. It changes the word. I try retyping it. Nope. I close the dialogue box. Autocorrect assumes I must be mistaken. Instead of writing my assignment, I end up having some sort of linguistic sparring match with my computer.
That’s not to say that autocorrect isn’t without some benefits. When you’re quickly tapping out a text message, it can often be very helpful. But when you’re working away on your final assignments, it can be important to make sure you don’t become overly reliant on it. I mean, it doesn’t even recognise ‘autocorrect’ as a word, so if it can’t even recognise itself, I think it’s fair to say it’s not the sort of system we should place our complete faith in. As a result, it’s worth making sure you take the time to proofread your work. Or, if you want to be super confident, turn off the ‘auto’ feature of autocorrect, so that it offers suggestions but never changes a word without your permission.
So as helpful as it can be, just be wary of this dangerous feature keep using this brilliant little thing.
Okay, I didn’t type that. Autocorrect is changing what I say. I am a liar and should no longer be allowed to write things.
What is it doing?! Autocorrect is my favourite.
Okay, I don’t understand how this is happening. Just ignore everything I said and use autocorrect all the time. It is definitely not a sentient artificial intelligence intent on destroying humanity. Many fun!
–Ryan Rayn That is not how you spell my name!
Some people consume
Raisin toast and melted cheese.
It sounds ick to me!
Registrations for the Student Leadership Conference have opened and with it so have your horizons.
Ugh. That was horribly cheesy. Poor form, Ryan. Let’s try again.
The Student Leadership Conference is coming up and you can now register for this amazing opportunity. Running on 9 & 10 October at the Mt Helen campus, this conference affords students the opportunity to further develop their leadership skills with a series of presentations, workshops and food. It’s not just for student who already consider themselves ‘leaders’, either. This conference is for anyone at all and works on building skills that you can take with you well beyond your university life. So come along.
The first day is optional (but still awesome) so if you can’t make it on the first day, that’s fine. But the second day is huuuuuuge. You get to hear from some community leaders; participate in workshops to do with politics, climate change, organisations and more; and even choose a specific social project to get involved in. All the things! It’s a full day too, so you get your money’s worth.
Whoa! Yes, okay, I said money. Hang on, hang on. You only might have to pay it. It’s $50, but you might be granted a bursary if you receive Centrelink payments, you’ll just need to provide permission for the uni to contact Centrelink. There’s also food and a secret dinner. Not as in, so secret that you have to hope you stumble upon it, secret as in the location will be provided by an agent via dead-drop. Or you’ll just get the location closer to the date. Probably that last one.
So if you’re super excited by that (and who wouldn’t be) you can find the program, look at the workshop session and register for the conference here.
If you have any questions at all, contact the Overseer (not his actual title), Luke Icely from Student Connect at L.icely@federation.edu.au or 03 5327 6867. He’ll definitely be more eloquent and informative than me.
– Ryan