It’s the second week of Semester One, and first-years all across the university are just beginning the process of coming to grips with university life.
Coffee orders are being settled upon (double-shot soy flat white), wallets are being bankrupted courtesy of a Boost juice every day, and some truly roguish first-years are even partaking in a beer.
At 2pm! What?
But here at The Obiter, we don’t want any first-years to be walking through university life without understanding a few important rules. One of the most crucial relates to education. It’s simple. Don’t miss a lecture! Lectures are an important part of understanding the substantive component of your course, before exploring that content in your tutorials.
And also, if you miss a lecture, you’ll go to jail.
It’s a fascinating quirk of the University of Queensland that any first-year found to be skipping a lecture will immediately be sentenced to a term of imprisonment, with Vice-Chancellor Peter Hoj often donning his Warden cap as the Chief Administrator of ‘The First-Years Who Missed Lectures Penitentiary & Rehabilitation Facility,’ located just below the Red Room.
Thinking that SOCY1060’s Week 4 lecture on environmental sociology isn’t worth it? We know what’s truly not worth it, and that’s six months in a dank, moist prison, filled with the drippings of spilt jugs of Iron Jack from above.
Reckon that you’re on top of CHEM1100? Doesn’t matter, champ. Want to sleep through your 9am lecture? Well, get ready to sleep on concrete floors whilst you’re literally serving a custodial sentence for the crime of skipping a lecture.
Obviously, the university has an appeals process, but you’d only learn about said process if you attended the lecture you missed, so there goes that chance.
To every new first-year (as opposed to every old-first year), university is about having fun, enjoying new experiences, and making new friends.
But unless you want ‘fun’ to be the half-hour of recreation time you get each day, ‘new experiences’ to be trying to kill the prison rats so you can have something meaty to go with your bread-and-soup daily meal, and your ‘new friends’ to be scary third-years who have been charged with academic misconduct, then attend your lectures.
Because once you’re in, it’s hard to get out.
Hopefully, no more to come.