I Am A Student

It's official, term has started with Week One, which is essentially induction and Fresher's Week.

In fact, I made a start last week with a practice run up the motorway to get the route straight, see how long it took, and to try and sort out the parking permit in advance. It wasn't actually necessary - parking is fairly anarchic for the first week, it seems, but I'm glad I went, because it just gave me a bit of orientation, and the unexpected bonus of my official student ID card. So I could go off to the council offices (for the third time) to apply for my Council Tax discount.

The first real day yesterday was a mixture of paperwork, more paperwork, and people standing up at the front of various rooms saying "Welcome" and very little else. I don't deny that the admin needs to be done, but the substantive content of the day was probably about two hours' worth, and I was there from 9.30am to 5.10pm. The compulsory 'Safety lecture' turned out to be about preventing fires in student accommodation, and wholly irrelevant to many of us who'd been told not to miss it. The most annoying part was that it was timetabled for the very end of the day, so it would have been fine to go home at 3pm when all the other meetings had finished.

The good part was meeting my tutor, and the special session for mature students. There are quite a few - a roomful out of 283 new entrants this year, but some of them are hardly mature at all! My timetable until January is better than I'd expected, with no lectures at all on Mondays, saving 20% of travel time and cost, and allowing for late returns from weekends away. Tuesdays and Thursdays run from 9 until 6, although we've been told that it's rare to actually end that late.