The past few weeks have mainly consisted of lots of uni work and lots of uni nights out so I’ve been getting a real feel for student life over here. This has led me to reflect in some detail on what it means to be a student in Australia.

Despite spending a year abroad here at University, my experiences are very different from the Aussies that are just doing their normal thing.

Firstly, it’s not common to move away from home for University like it is back in the UK. I’m living in a college on campus which is a pretty similar experience to the first year of Uni in Edinburgh but College Life is a lot more structured than Pollock Halls and it has more of a family feel to it as everyone’s really close. There are only 10 colleges on campus, and there are about 200-350 students living in each one. Since it’s not common to move away from home for Uni, the people at college are mostly from small towns in random places that don’t have a University near them. Also, since Aus is a relatively new country, especially in comparison with the UK, Universities over here don’t really have rankings like we do back home so you don’t move away to a ‘better’ school and there’s no above-par academic schools like Oxbridge or Edinburgh 

Since most people live at home with their parents, they tend to stay friends with their mates from high school and don’t have a separate divide from home/uni like we do in the UK. Since I live in a college, I don’t see this side of Australian student culture but you can feel the differences around campus during the week in lectures. These differences are pretty interesting but as an International Student it’s even more different. We integrate pretty well with the Australians at college but we have formed our own groups because we all go travelling at weekends and in school breaks and bond quite a bit then.

I’m still trying to make the most out of college as possible. The soccer season for the girls has just finished – we came joint second overall in the inter-collegiate league which was pretty cool since we weren’t taking it that seriously. We had two matches on the last day which was painful and it was so hot but we won against the most annoying all-girls college so we were pretty stoked. The boys won the overall football cup which was really impressive because they came out of the season totally undefeated. It was highly down to them having four amazing Brits on the team, including one of the Edinburgh First Team boys who’s on exchange out here with me, so that was pretty cool! Now that’s over, I’ve been looking to other activities to fill my time … I doing ‘Dancefest’ which is another inter-collegiate competition where each college does a mini dance show. Rehearsals are going pretty well so I think it’s going to be a success! The weather’s been getting really hot recently too so we’ve been playing quite a bit of Ultimate Frisbee outside in the afternoons with a bunch of people from college which is sweet! There’s a big inter-college ball coming up soon which should be a lot of fun and then my college have a boat cruise down the Brisbane River arranged for a few weeks time too.