Snapshots of Sydney Uni!

I attended a special program at The University of Sydney today called Degree in a Day. So basically 2 kids from each school are chosen to go there, and at first they have a few presentations on general information about the Uni, then you split up into pre-chosen electives, a morning and an afternoon one.

My morning elective was "Teacher for a Day" but before we went to that, the student advisers took each group on a tour of the campus. It's soooo beautiful! If you haven't been to Sydney Uni before there are all these beautiful sandstone buildings all over the campus. The tour included The Quadrangle, The Great Hall, Mannings (place to eat and hang), The Grafitti Tunnel, and Science Road.

Then we had our first elective. I got to meet some new people in our group work which invloved quite a bit of creativity and lateral thinking to demonstrate the need for such in teaching methods. Afterwards we had lunch (pizza and softdrink). I spent most of the day with a girl I met who chose exactly the same two electives as me and who goes to a school all the way in Orange. It was pretty cool to find out that she goes to a youth group there and was interested in finding out more information about KYCK.

After lunch we went to our afternoon elective, which for me was "Psychology". We did some more group work where we had a hypothetical situation in which WW3 had broken out and 14 people were left in a bomb shelter and we had to choose 7 of those people to save, knowing that we'd probably be the only ones left to populate the world. There were superficial descriptions of the 14 including, a homosexual footballer, an Asian farmer who was an illegal immigrant, a religious-fanatic mother of two, a call girl, an attractive lesbian medical doctor, a mildly retarded teenage musical genius, an aboriginal militant who graduated from sydney uni, a male midget, a handicapped telephone operator, an obese and balding politician, a radical hippie who is also an environmental ecologist and a few others. Anyway we had a few minutes to discuss in our groups and in the end we had to justify why we had chosen each person. It was interesting to see who people chose and why. We were then told that the aim of that activity was to show that stereotyping can lead to quick decisions, but it can also lead to wrong decisions. Then we had a questions & answers session which was really beneficial. All in all I had a good day exploring the campus and getting a bit of a feel for university life. Sydney Uni is definately an option for me so, I guess only time will tell.