Awash with apathy

At the end of third year, I was a credit to the strange breed that is the final year law student. I could work all hours of the day, spurn meals without notice and type until my hand cramped up. My crowning glory was 30 hours straight work, at which point I handed in my essay. Then I went to the pub.

Now however, I just feel at a loss. I have lost my drive; for nearly two whole weeks now I have almost completely failed to work. Instead I procrastinate, surrounded by an ever increasingly large pile of washing and general detritus.

I have lost my fire! I need something to bring it back.

Scotch, anyone?

Part 3: Just stop saying that!

This final section is so titled as a reference to the words which I have heard many times over this academic year. They have been said with cheek when staff confide juicy snippets of information that is to kept far away from undergraduates; they have been said as an abrupt retort whenever any complaint has been levelled against the department or the course itself; they have meant the giving of privileges, and the withdrawal of sympathy.

They provide the greatest summary of the last 9 months that I can think of.

"You're a postgraduate now"

I just wish they would stop reminding me.

Part 2: The Bad

The Bad

I have said that the self-reliance and expansive intellectual freedom is great. However, there is a flip side to this. Sometimes, no matter how hard you try, a topic is so dull that you would rather use an angle grinder on your own face than listen to another 5 minutes. When you have to spend some 10 hours a week reading it, to then present it in a tiny seminar group there is NO place to hide. You will be on the spot, and silence becomes rapidly apparent. As does the colossal hangover you are nursing from last night. Why did I have that tray of shots? And where did that traffic cone come from? Sometimes, you just don't want to take part; being forced can be really quite grating. My last seminar for one module trailed by, as all of us sat there, only begrudgingly commenting; the looks shot between us indicated that in all honesty, we just didn't care.


I have also found myself frequently competing for resources. The content of my course is fairly specialised, so the the number of the books on the subject that I have access to is often few and far between. I intensely dislike having to fight over a single copy of the so called "core" reading for the next week, for a book which is then placed on week long loan, and subsequently facing the brunt of a rant from my lecturer about not having done sufficient work. Frankly, go and shove you core text book where the sun shines not. Whilst I am quite technology savvy, and have somewhat of a knack for finding obscure references from the dark and murky depth of the internet, some on my course have really struggled in the face of this, and this has even shown in the assessments where people's interests have overlapped.

The amount of contact time has been, on occasions, depressingly small. Many of my modules have had a total of 12 hours contact time, squeezed into 6 short weeks. Often, I found this to be mean that at the end of a module I was left feeling that I didn't know anything, and essays became almost a complete start-from-scratch affair with nothing but a few short references to go on and a serious dearth of relevant notes. This becomes rapidly worse when essay deadlines are some months away and by the time I get round to doing them, my head is a veritable desert of knowledge and any glimmer of an oasis is merely a tempting mirage. Of course, I could just be more organised, but who am I kidding? I won't be.

The Masters Experience; Part 1 - The good

I thought I would make my first foray into something that perhaps is more helpful to others, and less of a personal rant. So, I want hereto outline some of my experiences as the seasoned veteran of student life that is The Masters Experience (I somehow feel it warrants capitalisation). With significantly more people turning to postgraduate education, either because of the recent economic slump or just to add another notch in the CV belt, I hope anyone out there considering it finds it useful. As this is quite a long post, I have decided to split it instead into 3 parts in the hope it becomes eminently more readable.

I should perhaps note that my postgraduate course, whilst remaining legally orientated, is not an LLM but rather that lesser beast that is the MA. I say lesser beast, but it is still has the potential to block the road to social life, and occasionally cover one in large quantities of last minute dung. Like having to look after a small child, with the bowels of a hippo. That has been at the chillies.

PART 1: The Good

There are many good aspects to the postgraduate way of things. There is a heavy onus on self-reliance, and personally I find this to be a good thing. Gone are the days of relative spoon feeding, and rigid structure. Instead I have relatively little contact time, and all my contact consists of seminars rather than lectures. Every week, I am therefore required to do work, participate and be self-motivated enough to go away and find things for myself. As a nice corollary to this, the seminar structure rapidly became more fluid, with lecturers letting us mould the syllabus as we wished, and constructed assessed questions with a broad scope so that each person could really explore any area they wished. I have even had the opportunity to completely choose my own questions. For some, this may be similar to undergraduate, but this was not the case for my seat of learning and warranted welcome refreshment from the strict confines of an inflexible syllabus. This is perhaps most true in the dissertation; almost complete freedom to do whatever you want (within academic reason).



Perhaps the most welcome aspect of The Masters Experience has been the chance to really develop in seminars. The people on the course want to be there. After all, forking out all this extra cash must be for a reason. This shows, as everyone has something to say and often the long seminars have flown by as a small number of us battle it out over some point or other, the lecturer sitting idly by. Well I say idly, often grabbing a pen when a particularly salient point is mentioned, and adopting the smirk that says “that will be in my next article, thanks.” Long gone are the hour-long torture sessions of cacophonous silence that were my undergraduate seminars. With a number of students from other jurisdictions, the insights into the way things are done elsewhere has been very interesting, and challenged the often entrenched views of how we do things over here being the best.