Thoughts From Places: UWA

Right. Wow. Okay. Exams are over.

I'm finally going to do this Thoughts from Places post. I know it's not this week's topic, but it was one of the ones I suggested, and I already have notes for it, and yes. Anyway.

The first thing anyone will say to you if you mention that you go to UWA is something along the lines of "Oh, it's such a lovely campus." While I guess this is technically true, it's not something I can say really played into my choice of university. But I think it tells us a lot about how we see and think about places like universities. They're not just learning factories. They're places that people have to spend a lot of their time, and whether or not that time is pleasant - whether in surroundings or in company - is actually important.

The lawn near Hackett Hall, Home of the Postgrads, Where Undergrads Doth Fear To Tread.

The other thing this made me realise is that, like Ali, I don't pay nearly enough attention to the environment around me. It took dragging a camera around for a day to make me realise that actually, the campus was beautiful, but that I was pretty much just rushing through it to get to places rather than actually spending time there. I spent some time a couple of weeks ago (yes, this post's been a while in the making) revising for exams in on the grass front of the library instead of inside it, which I've always dismissed as something which only happens to the unnaturally happy students on the front page of the website. It was actually really pleasant and, strangely, much quieter than the library.

Peacocks, which live in the Arts courtyard. There is a rumour that anyone who touches them is kicked out of the university.

That said, there's some stuff I realised I don't like as well. Like, there are these "friendly" rivalries on campus between faculties - Engineering vs. Law is the big one, but Everyone Else vs. Arts is the one that pisses me off the most - which I don't think are particularly productive. And this is sort of codified in the actual physical layout of the campus. One side has arts, social sciences, economics, and law, and on the other side is engineering, computing, mathematics and physics. I've never been one for the hocus pocus surrounding architecture and layout and stuff, but I have to say that maybe, if they weren't quite so physically separated, we might end up with groups which are slightly less isolated by faculty. Like seriously. All my friends from high school are engineers, and it makes finding somewhere to meet a right pain.

This is the library, which for some inexplicable reason, has a moat

So now that I've covered the philosophical, and the critical, it's time for the whimsical. If the east-west axis of my campus' cartesian plane is the humanities-sciences continuum, then the north-south axis is labeled something like 'fields, in order of obscurity'. At the north end there's arts and physics and such - big, broad, important ideas. And then, the further south you go, the stranger things get, until you reach - I kid you not - this:

Which is about as ludicrously specific as you can possibly get.

Anyway, that's my thoughts from uni. Hopefully with assignments and exams out of the way I can put some more time into this kind of stuff - after I get through my Youtube backlog, that is.