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dolorosa_12) wrote2010-04-10 01:54 pm
dolorosa_12) wrote2010-04-10 01:54 pm
Entry tags:
Sidere mens eadem mutato*
So, I've been having one of my periodic bouts of misplaced nostalgia, and for some reason this got me thinking about the various cliques within the Arts Faculty at Sydney Uni when I was a student there. You'll know the ones I mean.
At Sydney, there were three main, semi-overlapping groups that dominated the Arts Faculty. They probably didn't make up a majority of students there, but they were the loudest and the most visible, and so managed to set the tone within the faculty. I'm referring, of course, to the student politicians, the improv theatre types and the student journalists.
The politicians fell broadly within two camps: Labor Left (who were more career-driven and mostly seemed to wind up working as staffers for the NSW Labor Party, and tended to pass the SRC President position along like a baton), and broad left (your typical 'hairy socialist' types, who ranged from the Greens to Socialist Alternative types, tended to hold less senior positions in the SRC such as Women's Officer and seemed to wear the same protest t-shirts all year round). These two groups tolerated one another and would ultimately work together on whatever campaign they were focusing on that year (in my years at Sydney, these were mostly anti-Iraq War protests and campaigning against voluntary student unionism, HECS increases and full-fee-paying student places).
The improv theatre types were Theatresports regulars, forming slightly fluid groups to compete each Thursday for a place in the annual Grand Final. They also tended to run the Arts Revue, writing, directing and acting in it. Most of them have ended up being semi-successful in the field; I've seen some of them on TV, one of them acting in a Sydney Theatre Company production and others popping up on my Facebook friends feed advertising musical comedy shows in Newtown.
The student journalists modelled themselves on the Chaser guys (who of course had modelled themselves on The Onion) and took themselves very seriously. The student newspaper, Honi Soit, was as badly-edited as any student newspaper (written frantically in a week by people who were also full-time students and who cared more about getting the story out there than in misplaced commas or coding errors that caused two words to be joined together), but every so often they'd manage to write something truly revealing. A couple of them wound up working for the ABC or The Sydney Morning Herald, and in my opinion, they deserved it.
These three groups overlapped to a certain extent, because they had in common an interest in words and ideas. I should also add that some of the people involved in these groups were not Arts students, but Arts students certainly formed the bulk of the three cliques in the four years I was at Sydney.
I didn't really get involved in any of these groups at all, despite being an Arts student myself. Partly it was because![[livejournal.com profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/external/lj-userinfo.gif)
anya_1984 was at Sydney, studying Science, and was much better at making friends (and Science students, without these silly cliques, were much more friendly in general) and so her Science friends became my friends, so I didn't feel the need to meet people within my own field because I had awesome friends already. It was also partly due to natural shyness; I was too unconfident to try and join in with any of these activities, although I probably would've enjoyed student journalism. In my third and fourth years I made friends with some of these people through English Honours, but it didn't draw me into any of the cliques at all.
The odd thing is that I find the absence of similar cliques at Cambridge extremely disorienting.
Oh, sure, we have theatre types and student journalists, and even student politicians (although all are less scruffy and disreputable, more polished and driven, than their Sydney counterparts), but they don't occupy the same behemoth-like position that they did at Sydney. It's partly because Cambridge is bigger, and partly because it's so specialised and decentralised. You don't study Arts here, you study English, or Modern Languages, or Philosophy. You're a member of a college before you are a student of a faculty (especially if you're an undergrad), and so your social circle ends up being more diverse and less focused on certain types of intellectual activities.
Oddly enough, my own department is one of the rare exceptions to this Cambridge rule. ASNaCs are ASNaCs first and students of particular colleges second. We all socialise together, doing 'ASNaCy stuff'. It's funny that I should find what I (for the most part) lacked at Sydney - a group of friends within my academic field - and yet feel the loss of cliques of which I was never a part at Sydney.
I think it's some kind of belated disorientation. My first year at Cambridge passed by in a blur of gratitude and happiness, but because it was so uncertain whether I'd be here longer than that, homesickness was never an issue. I was determined to enjoy my MPhil, because it was so much better than my life before that, and I was keen to accumulate happiness and store it for future use. But after I began my PhD - locking myself in to at least three more years away from home - I sobered up a bit and realised that sometimes, I missed Australia so much that it was almost unbearable.
It wasn't that I missed who I had been back there, or what I had been doing. I was a miserable person, and I had been doing work that I hated that made me even more miserable. What I missed - and still miss - were the familiar structural things that built around my life. The things that, when I was living in Australia, I didn't even notice, but, looking back I realised were comforting in their familiarity. Stupid things like the look of King St, Newtown late on a Friday night, listening to the Triple J Hottest 100 onAustralia Invasion Day, the exact smell and colour of the sea at Bondi Beach (and how the smell and colour of the beaches down the South Coast were different), the unchanging nature of the road from Sydney to Canberra, egg and bacon rolls with tomato sauce and a cup of take-away coffee being sold at every cafe in the Eastern Suburbs and Inner West, and yes, dammit, student politicians in Che Guevara t. shirts shouting 'this war's about oil and US power' and handing out leaflets in lectures, spelling errors in Honi and theatresports on Thursday lunchtimes in Manning Bar.
There is nothing that will replace those things. I am here, and they are there, and for the most part, I can distract myself with my thesis and my friends and my books. But every so often, when I have too much time to think, I think about home, and I think about homesickness, and I'm reminded of all the little things which I cannot live without. And yet I do, and I will, and I must.
*Yes, this doesn't quite fit the context, but those who went to Sydney will get why I'm using that particular piece of Latin, and the rest of you can Google and work it out.
At Sydney, there were three main, semi-overlapping groups that dominated the Arts Faculty. They probably didn't make up a majority of students there, but they were the loudest and the most visible, and so managed to set the tone within the faculty. I'm referring, of course, to the student politicians, the improv theatre types and the student journalists.
The politicians fell broadly within two camps: Labor Left (who were more career-driven and mostly seemed to wind up working as staffers for the NSW Labor Party, and tended to pass the SRC President position along like a baton), and broad left (your typical 'hairy socialist' types, who ranged from the Greens to Socialist Alternative types, tended to hold less senior positions in the SRC such as Women's Officer and seemed to wear the same protest t-shirts all year round). These two groups tolerated one another and would ultimately work together on whatever campaign they were focusing on that year (in my years at Sydney, these were mostly anti-Iraq War protests and campaigning against voluntary student unionism, HECS increases and full-fee-paying student places).
The improv theatre types were Theatresports regulars, forming slightly fluid groups to compete each Thursday for a place in the annual Grand Final. They also tended to run the Arts Revue, writing, directing and acting in it. Most of them have ended up being semi-successful in the field; I've seen some of them on TV, one of them acting in a Sydney Theatre Company production and others popping up on my Facebook friends feed advertising musical comedy shows in Newtown.
The student journalists modelled themselves on the Chaser guys (who of course had modelled themselves on The Onion) and took themselves very seriously. The student newspaper, Honi Soit, was as badly-edited as any student newspaper (written frantically in a week by people who were also full-time students and who cared more about getting the story out there than in misplaced commas or coding errors that caused two words to be joined together), but every so often they'd manage to write something truly revealing. A couple of them wound up working for the ABC or The Sydney Morning Herald, and in my opinion, they deserved it.
These three groups overlapped to a certain extent, because they had in common an interest in words and ideas. I should also add that some of the people involved in these groups were not Arts students, but Arts students certainly formed the bulk of the three cliques in the four years I was at Sydney.
I didn't really get involved in any of these groups at all, despite being an Arts student myself. Partly it was because
anya_1984 was at Sydney, studying Science, and was much better at making friends (and Science students, without these silly cliques, were much more friendly in general) and so her Science friends became my friends, so I didn't feel the need to meet people within my own field because I had awesome friends already. It was also partly due to natural shyness; I was too unconfident to try and join in with any of these activities, although I probably would've enjoyed student journalism. In my third and fourth years I made friends with some of these people through English Honours, but it didn't draw me into any of the cliques at all.The odd thing is that I find the absence of similar cliques at Cambridge extremely disorienting.
Oh, sure, we have theatre types and student journalists, and even student politicians (although all are less scruffy and disreputable, more polished and driven, than their Sydney counterparts), but they don't occupy the same behemoth-like position that they did at Sydney. It's partly because Cambridge is bigger, and partly because it's so specialised and decentralised. You don't study Arts here, you study English, or Modern Languages, or Philosophy. You're a member of a college before you are a student of a faculty (especially if you're an undergrad), and so your social circle ends up being more diverse and less focused on certain types of intellectual activities.
Oddly enough, my own department is one of the rare exceptions to this Cambridge rule. ASNaCs are ASNaCs first and students of particular colleges second. We all socialise together, doing 'ASNaCy stuff'. It's funny that I should find what I (for the most part) lacked at Sydney - a group of friends within my academic field - and yet feel the loss of cliques of which I was never a part at Sydney.
I think it's some kind of belated disorientation. My first year at Cambridge passed by in a blur of gratitude and happiness, but because it was so uncertain whether I'd be here longer than that, homesickness was never an issue. I was determined to enjoy my MPhil, because it was so much better than my life before that, and I was keen to accumulate happiness and store it for future use. But after I began my PhD - locking myself in to at least three more years away from home - I sobered up a bit and realised that sometimes, I missed Australia so much that it was almost unbearable.
It wasn't that I missed who I had been back there, or what I had been doing. I was a miserable person, and I had been doing work that I hated that made me even more miserable. What I missed - and still miss - were the familiar structural things that built around my life. The things that, when I was living in Australia, I didn't even notice, but, looking back I realised were comforting in their familiarity. Stupid things like the look of King St, Newtown late on a Friday night, listening to the Triple J Hottest 100 on
There is nothing that will replace those things. I am here, and they are there, and for the most part, I can distract myself with my thesis and my friends and my books. But every so often, when I have too much time to think, I think about home, and I think about homesickness, and I'm reminded of all the little things which I cannot live without. And yet I do, and I will, and I must.
*Yes, this doesn't quite fit the context, but those who went to Sydney will get why I'm using that particular piece of Latin, and the rest of you can Google and work it out.