A Taste Of The Uni Life
Tuesday, February 24, 2015 10:34 pmUnknown
For the past two weeks I've been attending a physics bridging course, with a friend, at the University of Sydney. It consists of a morning and afternoon session of a one hour lecture followed by a two hour tutorial with a one hour break for lunch at 12:30. This gave me the opportunity to have a taste of what's to come in the next four years and the chance to explore my uni without hoards of students everywhere.
I don't like physics whatsoever, which is the reason I chose to avoid it for the past two years, but it's required in my course to have assumed knowledge on the basics of physics, which is why I thought I would take this opportunity and try to enjoy the subject.
Yeah, fuck no. I ended up finding myself trying to leave as early as possible to go off and explore to make up for the $395 I had to pay for the course. The only thing I got out of this was that you're not allowed to have metal objects during MRI scans because they're attracted to the MRI machine. There's a story about a doctor who walked in on a patient during an MRI scan and he had scissors in his pocket, and the scissors flew directly into the forehead of the patient and there's an x-ray image of it, cause who cares about the patient when there's science right?
So one of the coolest things about our uni is that our library is 9 stories high. It's probably the most technologically modern building in the whole campus - there are toilets on every floor (which is amazing because every other building we explored had one in the whole thing), and there are actual functioning lifts instead of creaking stairs, and the lights between each bookshelf have sensors that detect when you're approaching the next shelf.
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| Fisher Library |
For places to buy stationery, textbooks and university attire, we discovered three main places - Uni-mart, Sydney Store and the Co-op shop, all of which are very over priced, even with an Access Card (which students pay $70 for discounts on food and other things for a year but only in the main campus) and a Co-op membership (which is $25 for life and gives discounts for members).
Out of the three, we found Uni-mart had the cheapest stationary (with the Access Card), Co-op had a lot of quirky things that we could purchase and also sold textbooks (but is also still expensive with a membership) and the Sydney Store had the most variety of University of Sydney branded things (for example, graduation plush toys).
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| Sydney Store |
We found the coolest place to eat which was reasonably priced for the quality in the Holmes courtyard. It definitely looked so much better and was much more inviting than the other cafes and restaurants around uni, and the food was really good. We tried a pork sausage, mushroom and rocket pizza and had an iced chocolate and iced mocha (which totalled to $26) - all of which were deliciously satisfying.
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| Courtyard Restaurant |
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| Yummm |
There are a lot of small museums around campus and a lot of boards plastered with uni events and information about studies and where to get cheap textbooks, so finding something to entertain yourself during breaks isn't hard. It was definitely mesmerising to just walk around without any intentions and admire how nice the campus actually is.
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| Graffiti Tunnel |
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| Med Courtyard |
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| Holmes Reception Room |
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| The Great Hall |
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| Education Building facing the Physics Building |
The picture below is of Manning Bar, which is the main area for students to socialise. It has a bar on the top floor and apparently has the best grilled food on campus, but I have yet to try it. It's got a really charming atmosphere, despite the really squeaky wooden stairs and having only two bathroom stalls on each floor.
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| Manning House |
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| Manning Bar |
Having this opportunity to see things before experiencing the real thing has really got me looking forward to coming to the main campus to socialise, but now that I know how boring lectures are, and how useless tutorials can be, I don't know if I'm looking forward to the studying part.
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