On Friday morning I received the best news I have received in quite some time…
I got into the university I applied for!
No more Swinburne, with its grossly under-funded arts faculty and disgusting treatment of an education institution as merely a business… Onto RMIT, where money is kept flowing into the arts in the same way as any other “more profitable” degree, where my love of writing and sharing and learning will be welcomed and given a big warm hug.
No more creative writing classes full of psych or engineering students who “needed an easy HD”… Writing can be hard work, and the people I will be learning with next year will understand this.
I’m almost positive that my current image of the splendour RMIT has to offer is not quite what the reality will be, but I am also positive that the coursework is what I want from a university, and the attitude of the institution is what I would actually expect from a place of learning.
For those of you interested, here’s a link.
Sam van Zweden 
14/12/2009 at 6:10 pm
win.
16/12/2009 at 7:14 am
I completely agree with you, in that I’m also positive that your current image of the splendour RMIT has to offer will NOT be what you expect it to be. The grass isn’t always greener on the other side, which seems to be your hope….
After having studied at both Swinburne AND RMIT, I can tell you that my experience at Swinburne was INFINITELY better. Not sure where you got the impression of a grossly under-funded Arts Faculty (for a start, there isn’t an Arts Faculty), but the arts programs, as far as I’ve experienced, seem very well resourced.
17/12/2009 at 5:11 am
Hi Erica,
In terms of an “arts faculty” at Swinburne, if you’re talking about the design side of things I have no qualms with any of that. My partner got his qualifications as a graphic designer through swinburne and had a great learning experiece. What I do have a problem with is the way that the faculty of life and social sciences treated my degree.
I was majoring in literature and sociology – for sociology, the place is great. But I’m not interested in sociology other than as a way to entertain myself whilst fulfilling the requirements of a second major… What I really wanted to be there for was literature and philosophy, both of which were a bit of a joke. For literature, I completed very few units which I found helpful. Quite a number of “guest speakers” (journalists, working novelists, editors etc) didn’t show up due to the school constantly asking them to speak as some sort of love gig. Last semester as part of my philosophy stream I had to do a unit intended for psychology students, for the simple reason that Swinburne finds money-generating psychology much more important than philosophy. I have no problem with the unit in itself, I thought it should be a compulsory part of a psych major. But given that the unit looked at psychology in a way that was clearly intended for psych students, I found it useless, but the unit had to be completed as I had no other options.
…sorry, rambling a bit here.
As a whole, I feel that the literature stream at Swinburne is treated as a supplement for “more serious” or more profitable areas of study. The majority of people in my lit classes were there for easy grades, and as an institution Swinburne doesn’t celebrate its writing students… There is the June Shenfield poetry award anually but this has little to no advertising or enthusiasm from the school. Papers have been cut and just cannot get the funding needed to get back up and running, which wouldn’t be so hard if Swinburne maybe got behinds its students so they could make it happen.
And look, I’m sure these problems will crop up again at RMIT. But I haven’t been there yet, so I can only judge from the outside. And from the outside, having looked at unit outlines and what’s involved and just the ways RMIT supports its writing community, it looks better to me.
…sorry for such a long-winded reply!
Out of interest, what did you study?
19/12/2009 at 6:44 am
Oh, congratulations! Getting into the university that you want is such a great feeling! 😀
30/12/2009 at 7:11 pm
To be honest, I never learnt anything useful from any writing/lit class. And yes, I was one of those students who took writing classes to get easy HDs. My friends called those classes ‘taxpayer-funded bludge sessions’. (Admittedly, it’s less funny now that we’re actually paying taxes.)
Problem is that most writing lecturers aren’t writers themselves (a self-published arthouse novel doesn’t count). They’re just…well, academics.
Truth be told, I’m in favour of scrapping all writing classes and replacing them with a visit to the library. From personal experience, you can learn more about writing from reading a book than listening to a lecturer drone on about ‘extro-dynamic theories in fiction writing’.
31/12/2009 at 4:31 am
Hi Mikey…
Interesting… What was your major, if writing was just an easy HD for you?
Afraid I don’t agree – writing degrees are just as much about reading as they are about writing, and you can’t write well unless you can read well. While some people can do that pretty well on their own, a great many can’t.
Perhaps the problem is that the lecturers you’ve encountered have not been excited enough about words to convince you that writing courses are valuable. I’ve had lecturers like that… but I’ve also had some who got me entirely excited about putting pen to paper, and pulling apart other people’s efforts. This is what is needed more in universities – good lecturers! And a departure from “classics” – they have their place, and a very valid contribution to a writing life, but without departing from them we get stuck, so those lecturers who introduced me to new, challenging writing, I respected very much and looked forward to their classes. A visit to the library by myself would never have resulted in the authors they helped me discover.
S