With furious students holding campus-wide protests, the University of New South Wales’ experiment with trimesters this year has been a decided failure. But that won’t necessarily stop them, with the three-term format being adopted by an increasing number of Australian universities.
Among the UNSW ‘Cancel Trimesters’ campaign’s complaints are delays in degree completion, reduced time for work and internships during breaks, and the compression of the teaching and assessment stressing everyone the heck out – even more than usual.
Lesson One: Your workload is way worse under a trimester timetable. You know how you were going to leave that essay to the very last minute and procrastinate the next few weeks away? Well, maybe you should put that Netflix binge on hold, because your final exam is the week after and if you haven’t started studying ages ahead of it… let’s not think about the results.
UNSW students are particularly pissed off because the ‘3+’ system makes the third term mandatory, whereas most other unis offer an ‘optional’ summer session. Not that it makes much difference when it comes to your social life.
Lesson Two: Trimesters mean you’ll never see your friends from other unis ever again. Picture this: you’ve just finished your final class before the midway break, and you’re eager to celebrate. But when you message the GC, all you get are sad reacts. Everyone else is in the middle of an assessment period and doesn’t finish for another fortnight. You are alone.
The wacky timetabling means that breaks are either huge or tiny with no middle ground. UNSW’s 2019 academic calendar eliminates mid-term breaks altogether, relegating students to two weeks of respite every three months. The University of Technology Sydney, on the other hand, offers students nearly four whole months of break over summer.
Lesson Three: Good luck finding a way to fill all that time if you don’t take a summer course. Shoving on the brakes so suddenly and parking your brain for so long is going to have some repercussions. How am I supposed to not fall into a total existential crisis and disillusionment with further education if you keep me off campus that long?! It might be a good idea to keep up a revision regimen. Or daily Sudoku.
Start petitioning.