10 Year Reunion

This year marks the 10^th year since I graduated from University and I felt that I should celebrate. Although I have not worked in my field of study for a number of years, I still hold fond memories of my time at Uni. It’s where I discovered beer, many friends and my love of cycling. So what would be the best way to commemorate a decade of being in the alumni? Go back and experience it again for a day!

On my recovery day off the bike this week, my friend and I decided to take a trip down memory lane and spend a few hours back on campus. We donned our best ‘uni-student attire’, which is pretty much anything you want as long as you have a satchel or laptop bag over your shoulder, and head in for the day.

To me, University is supposed to be the pinnacle of research and development so I was expecting things to be drastically different. I mean, in the 10 years since I was last there, I expect  students to be riding around on Segway’s or Hoverboards and lecturers to be nothing but a hologram projection at the front of the lecture theatre from the other side of the world. I was bitterly disappointed to find that, except for a few new buildings, everything looked exactly the same.

When I was at Uni, my Nokia 3310 provided me with very little entertainment or purpose other than to make a phone call or send a text message. As fun as Snake3 was, there was only so many times you could play it before it becomes boring. Wi-fi was something that the rich and famous used and if I wanted to download lecture notes, I would pray that they would fit onto my 1.1Mb floppy disk or spend 5hrs waiting for them to download at home through the dial-up internet. Now, as we walked around the old buildings that I studied in, every single person had their face buried in their phone and walked around with ear phones in. I was surprised not to see people run into each other as no one seemed to look where they were going.

In the library, where I spent many an hour trolling through journal articles and lining up for the photocopier, there was not a single person in the actual book shelves section of the library. It seemed as though everyone was just trying to find some free wi-fi or get in line access to one of the library computers.

After a bit more walking around, my friend and I bumped into a student that I used to teach during my stint as a High School teacher. To give you an indication of how long ago that was, she had already completed one degree and was halfway through her second!! We asked her where we could find a lecture theatre that accommodates a large number of students so that we could saunter in along with them for some free learning and complete our Uni-for-a-day experience. We found a couple of large rooms, so we sat and waited for the hour to tick around to see which room would have a lecture.

At midday, a group of people began to congregate at the entry to one of the rooms so we joined them. As soon as there was a large enough number of people inside (we did not want to attend a lecture with a small number of people where we would be identified as fraudsters) we walked in as if we knew what we were doing and pulled out some paper and a pen. This did nothing to assist our guise as students as we were almost the only ones in the room that didn’t have a laptop or tablet. The lecturer came in and everyone brought up the lecture notes on their screen: ‘MGTS2607- Management and Employer Relations’. Sounds exciting.

I have to admit, it was one of the most boring lectures that I have ever attended and judging by the others in the room, they have also seen better. A few people were on Facebook for the majority of the lecture, the guy in front of us was sending Snapchat messages about how bad it was and a guy in the front row spent the entire time watching football on his laptop. No body answered any of the lecturer’s questions and people began to walk out halfway through. I felt bad, so when the lecturer asked her next question, I answered it, and to my surprise, I was correct.

Perhaps it is down to a some real-world experience or maybe we just stumbled into a really easy subject, but to me, most of the content seemed very ‘common sense’ with a bunch of University academic terminology thrown in just to make it sound official. Either way, we were pretty happy to get out of there at the end of the hour.

To top off our day back at Uni, my friend and I head to the campus pub, ‘The Red Room’. As we walked in, it was funny to see that nothing much had changed in there either. It looked like they still had the same old chairs and the same old pool tables.  And after paying for some food, I am pretty sure that the prices haven’t changed in 10 years either… $10 for a burger and wedges! Bargain.