FoshizniK!

I wondered if I could write 1000 words, about nothing in particular, in fifteen minutes.

Write or Die is a great little tool which tells you your wordcount in one corner… and time to write in the other. Pause for too long, the screen goes red and you need to SPEED UP! Pause a bit longer and it starts DELETING what you’ve written.

But what to write 1000 words on in fifteen minutes? No time to think or plan reall, no time to go back and edit what I’ve done. No time to try to reach a sensible conclusion. But so far, I’m just filling space, and that isn’t the aim of this exercise! (Write or Die does allow you to click “pause”, but that kind of feels like cheating… It only works once though.)

Have just finished the usual supposed-to-be-three-hours workshop class that I have every Wednesday afternoon. Like most of my classes, it seems to have disintegrated rather quickly, and only around ten people remain.

There’s about four of us from the UK. Then there is Fatmir from Kosovo, Neda from Iran or French Angola or something, Bandar from Saudi, one Portuguese girl, and a couple of others I’m not so sure about.

This leads to some interesting conversations. “What’s your country like? How much does it cost you to be here? (£20,000 in some cases, for a two year course!)” Most importantly, today at least: “Why are you so rich?”

One guy, as a typical student does, bought a 3-bed luxury apartment in Cambridge’s luxury CB1 development (well, the bit that got finished before they went bust…) to live in while he’s studying. No X5 or student halls for this guy! Another commutes in daily from Hatfield – until recently he was travelling from Finsbury Park every day. And I complain about fifty minutes on a bad day on the bus.

The workshop is “Learning and Skills Development” – basic Word/Excel skills, how to give good oral (presentations, you dirty fucker!) – that sort of thing. Normally I’d find this sort of basic crap exasperating, but being able to help out people who have never used Office before is interesting and hey, I might even make some money out of it.

As you can tell I am still not sure where I am going with this. What I do know is that with almost half my time gone I am at 322 words, which means I’m not going to hit my target for shit!

Anglia Ruskin is a very “non-traditional” uni. Less than 50% of students live on-campus, and there is a high number of students from the local area, almost unheard of at many bigger, more traditional universities.
The number of international students is also way ahead of most, particularly students from Germany, France, various ex-Eastern Bloc countries and China. Mature students, too, of which I am of course one, outrank most other unis in the UK.

There’s no SU bar any more because no-one used it. This makes sense – the priority of most students here is not getting as wasted as possible as quickly as possible (although that is, of course, the aim of most who live here) – it’s learning and achieving a good degree to help them progress in life – not because their parents told them to, or because it’s what they felt they should do.

The business school accounts for a large proportion of students, and generally if you take a course like accountancy and finance, it’s because that is what you want to do, rather than being something you have a vague interest in. This makes a big difference, because as we enter week 8 and the people who are here under parental duress or out of boredom have dropped out, you’re surrounded by people who actually WANT to learn rather than people who don’t. The fact that the average student graduates with £20,000 of debt also strains out a few of the malingerers and procrastinators too.

Strange place, though. It’s a small uni, and it’s something like 108th in the league tables – not good eh, although AIBS is one of the higher-ranking business schools if you include the likes of the London School of Economics.

2m47 to go, and only 627 words! ARGH!

So this week I’ve been working on my Introduction to Business Law essays. Two essays, 1000 words each – seems like a lot, actually isn’t enough. With my other module, Business Environment, I’m struggling to get anything down, although me and associate Phil did spend a couple of hours today writing essay plans. That makes me feel better, as all I need to do now is finish the research I started and put it into essay form. And some graphs – easyis

That’s it. 772 words, no spellcheck, no cheating, just a copy, paste and insert image / link.

Not bad eh.

Tags: Accounting, Cambridge, Mighty X5, People Of Foshiznik World, St Neots, Travelling, Uni, Work, Write or Die

This entry was posted on Wednesday, November 18th, 2009 at 6:44 pm and is filed under Musings. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.