I know that in my last blog I mentioned an intention to update this a little more regularly, however that's not really been successful, so this will probably be another rather large update I think! I'm also aware that a lot of this post is going to be centred on my classes and uni time, so it may be a little "law-heavy" but hopefully I'll have some other interesting stuff in there for anyone who isn't interested in the academic side of things.
Today is Friday 2nd August, it has been a little under a week since my last blog post and I've just finished my first full week of proper classes in Sydney. My timetable here is quite interesting, both in terms of the schedule of classes and the classes themselves. Usually in Glasgow we have large lectures which will be held in large rooms with maybe 150-200 people as well as smaller tutorials of 10-15 people which are more participatory and require a reasonable amount of preparation. On the other hand, here we just have seminars - which is almost like a hybrid of a lecture and a tutorial. The class number is quite small for a university class, or at least compared to what I'm used to, and there is a certain similarity to a high school class. There's a lot more participation, questions being asked and general activity in the class; it actually proves for a more enjoyable class I'm finding so far, even though you're expected to contribute a bit more. I'm also hoping that the on-going participation and necessity to be involved in the class will be helpful when it comes to studying for exams and there should be less need to frantically cram information in the final weeks!
The other difference that I've found about uni from my time here so far is that I'm only actually in three days per week! I only have classes on Mondays, Wednesdays and Fridays, which is a great way to break up my week a little. So, Monday of my first proper week began with Anti-Discrimination Law, which was an interesting experience given that I had no expectations of what these "seminars" would be like whatsoever, (Gary!) Personal joke if any of the fives lads are reading this! The class was quite interesting and fairly enjoyable, and it was the first of many classes where some of us would have to forget about, "How would EU Law apply to this matter?" This class was followed by Intellectual Property: Trademarks and Patents which was another fascinating insight into a subject area which hadn't been studied by myself before. It concerns the real life examples of all the biggest companies and brands in the world, and again seems like something which will really hold my interest this semester. The third class was Competition Law and it's probably the one class which I have done something similar to back home, since a significant section of the study of EU Law concerns competition legislation. Whilst not quite as engaging a class, I found the comparison between the EU and Australian approaches interesting, both in the similarities and the differences. These three classes are then repeated on Wednesday, after I spent Tuesday catching up on some household chores and some work for uni classes the rest of the week - quite literally day one and we've been given homework already.
Thursday night brought around another game of football, which was good fun once again - I could definitely get used to playing a couple of times per week and with virtually guaranteed sunshine every day. I tried to get a fairly early night after coming home from football and making myself some dinner (pasta and tomato sauce, if you're interested in that sort of thing) since I had a 10am start for class on Friday morning. The final subject that I'm taking for this semester is Commercial Dispute Resolution - another which I had no prior experience of studying. This was one class which I wasn't particularly looking forward to, purely because it was 4 hours long, from 10am till 2pm, once per week for the whole semester. "Surely we're going to have at least a break or two during that time?" and "Will we get to stop for some lunch or a coffee maybe?" were both popular topics of discussions among those of us who were taking the class. As it turns out, it's been my favourite class so far. I can't quite put my finger on why it was so good, but the lecturer was excellent, the subject itself really seemed to capture my imagination, it seems totally different to any other subject which I've previously studied and of course, he allowed us a break to go and grab a coffee - although I have to say, the 4 hours flew by.
I realise that I've just written a considerable wall of text, so I won't add any more to this particular post. I've pretty much covered all of my first week of classes anyway, so this seems like a nice place to round off for now. For anyone reading this who's disappointed not to find any scenic photographs attached to this latest post, then I can only apologise!
Jamie
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