State of the Meg Update

[megpie71]

So, I'm heading back to uni (again - hopefully this time I'll get a degree out of things). I'm studying part-time, because that way I'm not going to be overloading myself, and I'll be able to get things like, y'know, housework and such done as well as studying without pushing myself to the point of breakdown. Unfortunately for me, this week is O-week, which means I pretty much need to be on campus every day.

Yesterday was O-Day (Guild clubs & societies sign-up day). It did not go well for me.

A bit of background: I am hyper-sensitive to noise. Lots of noise overloads me, because I basically don't have a filter for "foreground noise" or "background noise" - everything I hear comes in marked "process immediately", so too much noise, and too many sources of noise, and too much volume means my brain literally gets overloaded. I am also somewhat claustrophobic in crowded situations - I prefer having something of a generous personal space bubble, and crowded areas make me anxious and panicky.

O-Day yesterday was trying to cram pretty much the entire cohort of first year students, plus a fairly substantial chunk of second and third year students, into a single 500m by 20m (widest point maybe 50m) stretch of the campus. Plus two different sound stages within about 100m of each other, dozens of club and society booths, and numerous corporate and social bodies trying to get people's attention as well. Essentially, if I ever wind up in hell, it will be like being stuck in something like this on a never-ending basis.

O-Day officially started at 12 noon. I was getting the fsck out of there by about 12.30pm, and I only managed to sign up for one of the (potentially four) clubs I was interested in. Even thinking about it now is making me feel uncomfortable. I have not felt so purposefully excluded in years. (This was actually probably the least of their accessibility fails - I wouldn't have wanted to be trying to get a wheelchair or walker through that throng without a cow-catcher bolted onto the front, TBH).

Fortunately the earliest I have to be on campus today is about 3pm, for a Mature Age study skills session, and tomorrow I only have one thing to attend (a one-off lecture for one of my courses, where I'm hoping to receive the unit outline, since it isn't available online). But I'm really not feeling welcome there or happy about being there.

Comments

[stardreamer]

Would earplugs help you at all, or does that just mean you end up missing things you need to hear?

Also, do you think pointing these things out to the administration would do any good? The ableism could be deliberate, but IMO a more likely cause is either "don't care" or "never even thought about it" -- and if it's the latter, they might be willing to make some changes if the problems are pointed out to them. Unfortunately, the mobility issue is the easier one to address; however, spreading things out to deal with that would also drop the overall noise level at any given location.

[megpie71]

I don't know whether earplugs would help or not - I suspect not, because at least part of my response to not being able to hear all that well is hyper-vigilance (school bullying never really stops giving, I find). I spent a few too many years as a kid with my hearing effectively dulled down to near nothing as a result of middle ear infections - not being able to hear what's going on around me makes me twitchy.

I did wind up writing a letter to the guild admin about it, basically detailing what the problems were and offering suggestions on how to improve things for the future.

I suspect at least part of the problem is actually down to a little quirk of state government policy which happened about twelve or thirteen years ago. Essentially, what happened is this: the Australian school year runs from late January to December, and when I was starting school, you started school in the January of the calendar year you turned six. The Australian financial year runs from 1 July to 30 June, and about thirteen years back, the state government changed the start date for new students to the January of the *financial* year you turn six (so you'd have students who were born after July 1 in the previous calendar year mixed in with students who were born before June 30 in the current one). This resulted in one "year" of students moving through the educational system with only a half-size cohort of students - only students born between January 1 and June 30.

That cohort were largely of the correct age to be starting university last year. Planners tend to estimate numbers based on the previous year's results, without really stopping and thinking about why those results might not be indicative. This year's cohort is full-sized. Everyone was largely caught by surprise by this. Things got messy as a result.

Incidentally, I'm feeling a lot better about things after the sessions I attended yesterday. Sometimes I really want to be able to take my jerk!brain and run it through the washing machine to try and get some of the daft out.