I don't know how other faculties or universities work, but this is what I'm experiencing as of now.

Since my faculty is a completely different thing from other faculties (I mean I'm majoring in music... how mAiNsTrEaM could that be in my country, right?), we have to also complete several credit hours that only apply to electives that are from other faculties that are like idk beneficial to us, like office application, moral studies, language and oral communication, that kind of stuff. I picked introduction to marketing (ItM), a core elective (I know it's contradicting but it makes sense), writing for academic purposes (WAP), and the ultimate legend of them all, positive psychology (PP).

Let's talk about the least problematic elective (so far) first, ItM.

I have to admit – I really love the lecturer. He's a pretty old man, probably in his late 60s-ish idk, and he holds a PhD and really knows how to interact with students. He's only been recently employed and he knows nothing about the university, so he doesn't know how our cOuRsE nEtWoRkInG system works, which I completely understand, but I can tell that he is a man that does NOT know how to waste time. The moment he walked into class, he set up all of his gadgets and stuff and made sure that not a single second is wasted on anything irrelevant. Still a fun man though, and that's why I like him.

Here's the thing: he's currently on medical leave. My house, regardless of whether by public or private transport, takes approximately one hour, if the traffic condition is in my favour. I travelled all the way to university yesterday to attend his 1.5 hour lecture just to find out (from my coursemate), just as I step foot into the building, that the lecture was cancelled. I mean... okay, I kind of understand that this is bound to happen if he can't reach out to us since we don't belong in the business faculty...

But what happened today was ridiculous. It's easy for our lecturers in my faculty to reach out to us because we add each other on social media and whenever happens to them, they can just send a text and we can spread the message to the rest of the group. I don't know if it's because this is only the start of the semester, but I have trouble adepting to the lack of proximity between the lecturers and the students. The only ways we can find out if a class is cancelled is through the CN, or through the paper notices pasted on the door of the classrooms. For this lecturer, the 'remarks' section merely mentioned that he was on medical leave, and it didn't mention how long it would last, and there was no paper on the door of the classroom of today's tutorial. So we thought: okay, if there isn't any form of notice, there should be a class today, even though we all know nobody gets only one day of MC. aNd hE wAsN'T tHeRe.

Look, I don't know if this is the lecturer's problem (I doubt...?) or the faculty's problem, but what the heck. Vague cancellation details are a no-no for not just me, but IDK 500 more students of yours who don't stay in the hostel and actually have to travel from afar to receive your management bull. On to the next course.

 

Okay OOT but I'm trying to calm my down while listening to Spotify and they won't stop playing Astro's songs how sweet

 

I had already expected WAP to not be that much of an interesting course because... sorry, if I didn't do music, I would have went for languages or psychology. I understood that it's essential for us to join this course because it would really benefit us when we have to write essays and theses in the future. But what the hell is wrong with your schedule? We have 2 groups of lectures, and for some reason, they insisted that they split classical music students from contemporary music students (even though we are considered as one faculty) and we had to separate from each other. Then other faculties had problems because they have clashing schedules (we don't because we foundation students have already completed most of our courses during the previous semesters. Because of that, they had to change our lecture groups thrice.

My faculty made almost no complaints (except for that one junior whose name was nowhere to be found on the list since forever) and we became a ball that they kept on kicking around. In the end, both contemporary and classical students ended up in the same lecture group.

If you were thinking that maybe they did this to let us interact with students from other faculty, nO. I thought this was the reason at first, but we only have one group assignment, and we were supposed to actually write an essay based on our department for that assignment, which meant that my group is supposed to write about any topic that is related to music, which meant it is ideal for us to... not work with other faculties.

 

I don't understand other faculties, but WAP wasn't the worst, because at least they've come up with a solution. And I ing swear to god, I want to strangle whoever was in charge of positive psychology, because clearly you're not letting me have positive psychological effects on my brain.

 

PP, unlike the other electives, technically lasts for 3 hours because its tutorial is right after the lecture. Which means it a grind course, but at least it only happens once a week. Last week, we all went into the class, made some jokes with our past theory lecturer who is now on sabbatical leave because of his Taiwan tour(? I'm not sure if he was on tour but he was holding masterclasses and stuff) about how the lecturer for PP is equally unpunctual as he is (because most of his classes are in the morning, and he hates mornings), but the jokes went too far when the dude was MIA for almost 20 whole minutes. We weren't the only faculty that was there, but our faculty was definitely the only one that actually gave a about the lecturer's absence – the others were having fun among themselves.

Something was not going right, and my oldest classmate (I'm just going to call him CS, a lot of you probably know about him) was slowly sinking into a bad mood as he decided to call the office to find out what happened. They did not know which faculty this course is from, and they kept on throwing him to different lines from different faculties. I could tell he was in fumes because I was, and my classmates all know very well that when something goes wrong within an organisation or management, we are sure to be the first two people who gets pissed off, and whenever one of us gets mad, the other one is sure to feel the same.

As they finally found him the right faculty, some random lecturer entered and told us that the actual lecturer is absent because that person is hired as a part-time lecturer, and all of my friends had the same reaction: sO?, and I will explain why at the almost very bottom of this rant.

All that dude did was just come in and brief us about the course outline, how we will be graded, what are the topics that we'll be learning, yada yada yada. And that was it for the day. We were let off after 30 minutes. Students were asking him about what we're supposed to do for the rest of the day, and he said that we could just go. He passed a piece of paper around to let us 'sign our attendance', even though I don't know if he even collected it later. I just had to ask him for the lecturer's name, and he gave me this ing holy answer.

 

"Actually, we are still looking for a suitable candidate as your lecturer."

 

They literally let us ing sign up for a ing course that wasn't even assigned a ing lecturer in the first ing place.

The best thing about this is that we went to the other students and asked what they were told by that dude, and they were so ing chill as if this happens all the ing time.

I was told that we will be assigned a lecturer by the next time we meet, and that is... oh I don't know, less than 24 hours from now. And what do I see on the student portal? Still not an assigned lecturer.

 

Look, I don't ing care about whether your lecturers are working as full or part-time staff but that should not be the reason to your mismanagement. My faculty literally lives on part-time lecturers because each student learns a different instrument and not all 15 of the permanent staff here knows like 6 instruments each (though our youngest staff does know 4 to 5 instruments, he's a beast) and we work just fine. Everyone has a lecturer, every one can have their private lectures normally, and look: almost all of our staff, permanent or not, are currently still actively performing, and being absent for just one day would mean that they have to replace up to FIVE students' lessons, and yet nothing goes wrong, the office doesn't complain, students don't complain either, nothing to be worried about. Why am I not seeing the same level of efficiency in your faculty?

PLUS, you HAD a choice whether you would close applications to pick select a course if anything goes wrong before the course selection period, because I have PROOF. Remember I mentioned my lecturer that's on sabbatical leave? He was originally responsible for teaching French diction, but the office announced that since he was absent, the course will not be offered for this semester. They were able to do that, absolutely yes, although later they opened it again because there was a part-time lecturer who was able to substitute his place. SEE? Even if they couldn't find a substitute, no students would be hurt nonetheless (unless they really wanted to learn French diction and it's their last semester) because everything was planned properly and we had time to find a backup plan. All your faculty knows is to act like you're confident that you're definitely going to get a lecturer, then waste two weeks of my time, and almost got me reprimanded for mistakenly double-scheduling, thinking that PP is dEfInItELy cancelled tomorrow (though obviously, the odds are there).

 

 

 

I really don't understand how all of this is actually happening to like courses from THREE different faculties? Exactly how often does this happen? If this happened once, would it happen twice? Do we really pay like 50k a year just to get this kind of treatment from the university? We were literally crowned as the best private university in the country (I'm not even going to hide my location, you already know which country I'm from, now you know which university I'm throwing shade on) and you're giving me this kind of bull just because, oh, I don't know, it's normal?

Just because it's the norm, you're not going to admit that it's a problem that needs a solution? So does that mean that we don't need to help countries that are struggling with poverty because it has always been that way? We don't need to stop littering because pollution is something that we're all familiar about?

 

 

 

 

The only norm that I see right now that doesn't need to be changed, is the fact that my faculty is the only faculty that makes ing sense in this entire hole.

 

 

 

FUN FACT:

Recently there has been an outbreak of hacking and scammers within my faculty, presumably because we didn't log out of public computers (IDK how far spread this problem is in other faculties though, but a lot of my juniors and seniors have fallen victim), and I just so happened to hit the perfect timing and posted about how much I miss my faculty on Facebook. It has been one week, and there are still people being concerned that I could have been hacked, even though I posted the same thing TWICE (the second time I posted and mentioned that my account wasn't hacked... someone asked if I was dared by someone else to post it kdjhfkadjf) and this has become the second (or third) meme I've created this year. Everyone (including Mr. Sabbatical Leave and other lecturers) thought that I was acting absolutely bizarre (not like I rarely do... although I am sometimes the sanest person whenever we're in public), but after understanding the reason behind all of this, they began to agree with us and got really pissed too.

I guess this is the pros of being educated in an at least more organised, efficient, and logical environment.