Starting Uni Again

Well, uni re-commences classes today. I have my two blocks of on-campus time on Tuesdays and Wednesdays (two lectures and a tutorial on Tuesday; a peer mentoring appointment, a tutorial, and a social group meeting on Wednesday). I'm also expected to do about seven to ten hours per week of private study for each of my units, things like getting caught up on the readings, doing research, thinking about the course content and integrating it together, thinking about the readings in the context of the theme for the week and the content we've taken on previously and so on. Oh, and doing the assessment tasks, but those are also expected to take a bit of extra time as well.

Maybe I should point out: I'm doing two units this year from the Communication and the Literary and Cultural Studies side of my double-major degree. Which means quite a few of the "readings" I'm going to be dealing with this semester are going to be things like movies, TV shows and so on. The units are called "Engaging Media" and "Introduction to Cultural Studies", so yeah, lots of visual media expected. This is where quite a bit of the two hours of study/reading time per day is likely to go.

I'm also in a unit which is apparently going to let me get away with writing fan-fiction for one of my assessments. Which I think is a hoot - and I'm sort of rubbing it in at Steve a bit. I'm doing a double major in Creative Writing and Literary and Cultural Studies, which means I'm in an overall course of study where I'm expected to watch movies, and I can get marks (and have already received marks) for writing fanfic. It's a bit hard not to be a tad smug about it.

(On the other hand: the course coordinator for "Introduction to Cultural Studies" basically sent out an email saying "if you don't have a Netflix account, now is a very good time to get one". So I'm looking at a minimum of $10 per month to cover the cost of "readings").

I'm sort of looking forward to the semester, because I do like studying, and I enjoy the subject matter. I've been involved with online fandom for years, and recently I realised this is something which is basically keeping the cultural studies muscles in my brain flexible, so to speak - cultural studies is about pulling out the effects of cultural product on people and how it's put together and so on, and fandom covers a lot of this territory as well. So this is basically me finding a degree in my hobbies. Which I don't mind at all. Plus, of course, I've been formally studying cultural studies, on and off, since about 1989 (yup, coming up for thirty years now... I really do need to be getting some formal qualifications in this, don't I?).

I have the standard "will I get along with my tutors" thing happening (a good tutor I can work with is a godsend; one who pings off all the wrong resonances in my head tends to be a problem), and I'm sort of wondering about the lecturers as well (I think I know who one of them is, but I've never seen the other before). So it's all about discovery and so on - something I know I'm not particularly good with (side effect of autism spectrum life - change is a bit more disruptive than the usual, and I spend a lot of time and effort working to ensure I adapt to it as fast as possible). But I've done this before, and I can cope with it.