It’s Sunday night. My desk is very messy, filled with documents and brochures. There’s almost no control of what’s happening. This is my desk after week 1 at Sydney University.

Here’s the back story if you missed it. It’s been a week at a new university, and I’m exhausted. Three 8am starts, and a 9am start. Thankfully the early starts are gone, more on that later.

If I had to describe my week in one word, it’s ‘chaos’. Most of the time was spent sitting in introductory lectures, and chasing up my credit application. It’s strange to be doing all first-year subjects in my second year of university.

Because I had completed units at Macquarie, I applied for credit at USyd. Who would have thought that this ‘simple’ application would take 5 weeks to process? I got very frustrated at the lack of progress, because this meant that I couldn’t finalise my enrolment. The application was only completed on Friday afternoon, and then I got a clear idea of what to study for this year.

There was something interesting about the outcome. I had been given credit for Accounting 1B, whose prerequisite was Accounting 1A. Naturally you would think that you wouldn’t need to do both subjects, but no, I was told I had to do Accounting 1A. This was because prerequisites are ignored during credit applications. On one hand I thought this was ridiculous, but to put a positive spin on this, at least I could ‘revise’ the things I learnt last year.

Now, the timetable. USyd would prefer to let a computer decide your timetable, no matter how ridiculous it looked. I thought I wouldn’t bother changing my timetable much because I would have to change it again depending on the outcome of the credit application. Part of the reason I was frustrated, was because human-assisted timetable changes closed at the end of last Friday. If the credit application wasn’t back by Friday, I’d be at the mercy of the computer. Luckily I was able to get a human to change my timetable, and now I have three 11am starts, and a 10am start, with Wednesdays off.

I’ve also bumped into old friends, and people I haven’t seen for a long time. At least that’s something good that happened. I’m also liking the longer train trip. At least I can read or sleep comfortably.

The brochure to the French Film Festival remains unread, and that starts this Tuesday! It should be a good lineup this year.

I’d better get back to the readings for this week. So much to read! Talk soon.