Education, Health, Food and the Doom of Stick-shifts?

Differences in education, Australia vs. US, based on my limited experience:

- $: tertiary education is cheaper in Australia, even compared to state schools, etc. Nice!

- tertiary education is not as widespread, it seems. or rather, it seems much more common that people will skip straight to a decent career or do some limited tertiary education on the way

- students are not as respectful in lecture... talking like whoa, playing cards, video games (e.g. PSP), ... really? a card game in lecture? why come? this unfortunately makes it harder to pay attention and hear occasionally

- people can't study whatever they want here. let me be more specific... at the end of high school you take a series of exams (subject based, i believe), and along with other factors these results end with a UAI (university aptitude index??) - a number out of 100 that represents your academic chops. now here's the deal... at a given university, different majors require different minimum UAI scores. so if you attend UNSW, if you want to study law you have to have a UAI of 98 or above (or something)... medicine is 92, computer engineering 85, ... etc (these aren't necessarily exact, but just for example). dude! sucks.

- this is perhaps *somewhat* related to the fact that universities here are much less liberal artsy, if you will. out of some 180 or so credits to graduate (depends on the degree), perhaps 164 must be taken in your major. for Electrical Engineering, for example, this translates to taking alll of your four years of courses in ELEC with the exception of 4 half-credit GenEd courses. for comparison, for my EE degree, I have to take maaybe 18 of my 36 courses in engineering or related technical areas (math physics etc), let alone specifically in ELE (maybe 5-8?). shoot. not my kinda game. after all, that's one of the reasons I decided to go to princeton and decided not to even apply to a school like MIT - I wanted full access to top notch humanities (read: non-science) courses and the flexibility to take them.

- as a result, a perhaps somewhat redeeming factor is that some of the undergraduate programs here (e.g. Law, Medicine, Engineering, ...) are intense enough that grad school is much less often required to enter the profession. at the end of 5 or 6 years of law, you take exams, intern, and have a law degree (no need for a separate 3 years of law school). and so forth. i guess it's another way to do it (similar to the 6-7 year combined undergrad/medicine programs in the US), but being forced to do it that way? i definitely wouldn't be an EE student here!

- final exams. whoa. so i'm used to a big emphasis on the honor code to the point where there is never an adult in the room during tests or final exams or anything. the prof. or TA hands out the exams, explains some things, sits around for the first 5 minutes or so then says "i'll be in the hall (or my office in the next building) if you have any questions," and leaves. here, exams are a huge affair with many held in huge rooms at the nearby racecourse with individual desks and nazi volunteers who won't allow backpacks, water bottles or nutritional sustenance into the exam room. strict as! (as they say here: as! (no noun or anything after the as... dead as a doornail! -> dead as! = very dead))


I have a note in my "forblog.txt" file on the election, and how I was flipping out about it and was nervous and excited and worried, etc. I guess I can relax about that now... though not everything ended quite as nicely as it could have. I'm referring in particular to California Proposition 8 which amended the Cali constitutition to ban gay marriage. That the Democrats are unlikely to get 60 seats in the Senate is also disappointing, but that was a long shot.


In other news, apparently Australia is now the fattest nation in the world, having stolen the prize from the US. Though most people may not be aware, we all know that it only happened because I moved here and totally messed up the averages.


As it turns out, where I live on the coast near Sydney doesn't seem to be most representative of the obese population, and the coastal pathway passing in and out of various coves, beaches, cliffs etc seems to be particularly popular for running. I've run there a few times, and it is beautiful and fabulous. I keep thinking that one day I will get into the habit of running every morning. Or most mornings perhaps. Maybe finding an attractive running partner would help...


I may have already mentioned it, but one thing about studying abroad here is that it has naturally emphasized certain differences between university life here and college life in the US. One factor that was particularly noticeable to me was the social life. As it turns out, perhaps because there is less of a tradition here of parents paying for children's education (as one person saw it), many more of the students here not only go to college near where they live, but they also commute to uni (as they call it) from home. That leaves very few people living on campus, and many with an average commute of an hour each way. This is in contrast to the US where most students, if they don't live *on* campus, live nearby in apartments or houses with other students. In Australia, college students socialize with their friends from home/HS more so than in the US. Part of this is an issue of convenience. Even when one is able to breach the norm of superficial communication to talk to someone for a while and pursue further friendship, the distance is a barrier. Cool, nice to meet you, let's hang out! Great, I'd love to, but I live an hour and a half away... maybe we can meet on campus for lunch or coffee. Which is great, and fun, and all good and well, but isn't nearly the same as a college scene where everyone lives so close that more substantial hanging out is much easier. That's not to say that more hanging out doesn't happen, just that it's harder and thus less common.

One result of this is that I ended up spending the vast majority of my social time with study abroad students (esp. Americans that I live with and met through roommates and other friends). As was unsurprising, that social scene was based largely on going out and drinking. Not impenetrable for a sober soul, but much less interesting and fun.

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Mmm... wow. It's amazing how luxurious an (almost) all-nighter can feel when eating warm croissants dipped in Nutella in the warm heat of the rising sun.

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How do you feel about the approaching conflict between manual transmission and environmentally friendly (i.e. more so than small stick-shift cars) vehicles... you can't have a (legitimately) stick-shift hybrid!! (Please correct me if I'm wrong.) Yikes...

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I really miss good potato chips - e.g. spicy kettle chips.
Oh, and good food. Sometimes food here is good. Sometimes.