Orientation

If the walls could talk...Jameson Hall on Jammie Steps

The flashes of panic I was having about my impending academic journey had evolved into a more pervasive sense of bewilderment by the weekend.

Part of the bewilderment is that nothing is actually as it was – the library is not where I remember it, for example, and you can't drive down University Ave. And places are called by different names: The Steve Biko Lecture Theatre, The Molly Blackburn Hall...who would have thought? I feel like I have entered a parallel universe and someone has messed with my memory.

I was unprepared for the emotion I felt climbing up Jammie steps on Thursday on the way to the postgraduate orientation session. Thankfully, at 830 in the morning there were not many students around to see the middle-aged woman with wet cheeks pausing to soak up the moment. It seems like a lifetime since I first ventured up there.

It’s a long way from handwritten assignments in the Occupational Therapy department on the other side of the cemetery below Groote Schuur Hospital. At the orientation, someone from the library was talking about consultations by appointment, the writing centre person about developing writing and the IT manager about computer labs with uncapped bandwidth and free on-campus access to wireless.

Later I noticed that the change in student diversity has been as dramatic. Now it is only age that may make me stand out from the crowd but I am willing to believe that at UCT I will be treated with suitable irreverence. At least no one here will call me “Tannie”!

I haven’t met my whole group but probably the majority are half my age...and have been studying English and language and literature in the time that I have been raising children. I am envious of the ease with which they engage with lecturers and the certainty with which they are making choices.

After two tries, I have survived the registration process and am now in proud possession of a student card. I look forward to the week ahead when “all will be revealed”. Now I just need to remind my family that the toilet-paper fairy has left the building...!

As time goes by

When I was at university in the 80s, I took notes by hand, and rewrote them at night struggling to decipher my feverish scrawl at the small desk behind the door in the room I shared with my sister. My sister surrounded her bed with a ring of salt to ward off evil spirits which she feared may have come in with the black bag of bones I had brought home for my Anatomy studies.

But I digress. Back in the day, it was acceptable to hand in assignments which were "neatly hand-written" if you didn't have access to a typewriter. Computers were still a dream, like democracy.

My dad owned a small grey Olivetti typewriter. Every evening he would sit at the kitchen table and pound away at the black keys using two fingers to write his reports or exam papers.  The tick-tack-tick-tack rhythm of the machine interspersed with a “cling” and a “swish” as he got to the end of the line, was calming, like a bedtime story, when we were too old for a nightly installment from “365 Bedtime Stories”. Sometimes, when he wasn't busy, I would get to use it for a special assignment, correcting paper at the ready...and carbon paper for copies.

I was thinking about this while trying to decide what courses to do this year, now that I am planning to charge up the brain cells. “You can look everything up before you go to register,” said my daughter. For once she didn't roll her eyes at my technological challenges as she downloaded the faculty handbook and guided me through the 400 pages.

“Are you sure you need to go to orientation all day?” she asked. “You’ll probably find your way around just fine.” Well, having not spent any significant time on the main campus the first time around, I do need a bit of help trying to “navigate the administrative maze of post-graduate studies”. I would hate anyone to have to spread salt to still my spirit if it takes to rambling around the ivy-covered buildings! 

Taking the Gap

I choked on my litchi juice the other day. I had just popped the litchi into my mouth when someone asked my daughter where she was thinking of going to university and whether she would be staying at home. Cape Town university is a hop and a skip away. She very quickly replied that she was definitely not staying at home. I have been saying for a while now that she is going to be flying the nest soon - what with Canadian exchange and service projects in Thailand, it comes as no surprise. So I don't think that's what made me choke!

I cannot believe that this is her last year at school, though. And the question of a gap year vs going straight to university has been debated in our house for a little while. It is a hot topic. Many people are against their children taking a year off as they think that it is a waste of time and money and that they will find it hard to settle back at university afterwards. They think that it is best that they continue straight on while they are still in the head-space for learning.

We are quite open to this idea but not as a year off to waitress for peanuts in some little known English pub. A year off doing something worthwhile (like building water tanks in a Thai village) or doing a short course and some travelling sounds like a worthwhile experience. A friend's son is spending time in Italy doing an art course before he comes home to study architecture. Someone else I know spent time at a school in the Loire valley in France, having studied French at school.

I think that if you are unsure what to study after school, it makes sense to take a break rather than rushing into a course that you later find out to be the wrong one after you have spent money and time on it. Certainly I wish that I had had that opportunity. Not that I regret studying what I did. But I was young, university was a huge cultural shock in the apartheid era, and I found it difficult to settle in to the structure straight away. There were a few students who had travelled overseas for a year, and you could see the difference that made to their attitude towards studying and the maturity with which they handled university. 

So, like I say we are open to the idea. But I hope she won't be like the Greek woman I met a while ago. She is married to a South African and has settled here now with two small children. They met in the UK when they were both students. They both did post-graduate studies and then married. She was 17 when she left Greece to study .....and now get this.....she never actually went home to live again. I am not sure how I feel about my daughter leaving......forever.