Feeling Lucky

Wow. Its been a while since I wrote anything here and has reached a stage at which so much has happened and changed it is now difficult to come up with what to put. I have spent the summer holiday traveling around New Zealand – on my own for the first month and a half, then with visiting family (hooray!) Uni will be starting up again soon – class officially starts in just over a week but I will be doing field work for my geology paper starting Tuesday. (Oh goodness me I am excited!!)

All of my flatmates have moved in and signs point to us getting along nicely. Paul and Liz are geology students from small universities in the United States (St. Lawrence and Whitman respectively). Alistair, from Auckland, studies accounting (and surveying?). More pertinently, Liz knows how to break apples apart without a knife, Paul is talented at driving vehicles in narrow places, and Alistair worked this past summer on a tourist boat to Antarctica (has many pictures of poo covered penguins and ice shelves) He will also happily kick hedgehogs out of our green space. Literally kick them. I almost want the cute bugger to come back so I can try my hand....er..foot at it. This is Alistair’s first stint for uni flats (international student flats managed by the university which provides furniture, appliances, cutlery etc) so we have all of the things which he furnished his flat with last year. In other words, we have the most well equipped kitchen in the whole city! :-) My flatmates are similarly bewildered by the drinking culture at Otago (extremely loud music, broken glasses, and getting shit-faced as fast and as raucously as you can) – just doesn’t seem fun. Our flat is unlikely to ever be the source of drunken mayhem and, as far as I can tell, there is only one party house between me and campus. Hooray!

I need to sort out a whole summers worth of experiences and do some serious reflecting but for now I will just wax poetic about the benefits of liberal arts education. Turns out (unsurprisingly) I am very, very much a fan. In walking the lines between disciplines, you don’t feel as trapped in the structures of knowledge constructed by academia. You may get to the end of your educational journey with less practical skills in your given field but you have a better appreciation for the complexity of the world around you. I have discovered a serious discontinuity between what I expect to get from being at university and what my kiwi friends expect. The bottom line: the NZ academic system does not seem to understand the logic behind liberal arts. I was trying to find a paper (class) to replace something which had been shifted to second semester and needed to have one of the actual instructors sign off because I hadn’t taken the prerequisite. After asking me some questions, he decided that I should be doing a one-year post-graduate diploma, looked up the details and started reading me the requirements. “Is there any coherence to the courses you’ve taken?” well....yes.... sort of but definitely not institutionally. He commented that I would need to have completed my bachelors degree but I had explained to him that I was essentially done with mine. When I told him that graduating would invalidate my scholarship, he just sort of looked at me in puzzlement: what an odd restriction! who would ever create such a scholarship? Thank you Katherine E. Sullivan! Thank you Sullivan scholarship committee! It is such a mindboggling privilege to be here feeling out of place.