324 words
on
Uni
Term has started again and brought big changes with it. Not only are the new students now charged university fees (for the same old crappy ‘service’) but they also changed the lecture schedules. Traditionally, the scheme was quite simple: lectures in the morning would start and end on an even hour and have a break in the middle while lectures in the afternoon would start and end on an odd hour. Handily giving people an hour off to have lunch in between. While I preferred the system they used in England – with one hour lectures (which both gives more flexibility in planning and which I found to have better / giving less tiring lectures where you go at full speed for 50 minutes and then you’re done rather than just starting to get tired after an hour or so – this approach still seemed quite natural.
Now they changed things. And all lectures start and end on even hours. The lunch break will be a matter of luck, I suppose. I find this quite odd. Usually the university is pretty immune to change and I wonder why that happened. Perhaps because there tend to be more and more students and so they have to cram more stuff in the same time frame (although there isn’t more staff, so it’s not quite clear who should actually teach the extra lectures). Or – not that it is particularly common in our department, but it is over at the philosopher’s – they want to make sure that all lectures and seminars are over at six in the afternoon. So they can turn off the light and heating to save money.
The thing about light and heating certainly isn’t a joke. Apparently the university is so broke that they urged all the departments to completely close down between christmas and the new year so they can save money by closing down the buildings for a week. Sad.
October 17, 2006, 1:18
Tagged as
uni.
The university I study at may now officially be called “elite”. Meaning that it will receive 21 million Euros each year for a five year period.
As many of my professors pointed out with dry humor, that’s exactly the money they took away from the university during the last few years. Only that now they won’t be re-hiring the staff we lost but buy better computers instead. It’s a sad, sad thing.
Regarding the “crappy service”: same thing here—at least most of the time.
October 19, 2006, 22:55
