Today's Ypulse Guest Post is from David Moon, a recent graduate from the University of Adelaide.  I had the pleasure of meeting David when he spent his year abroad studying at UC Berkeley and as an American Studies major, I thought he would have some interesting insights towards how the campus cultures compared. If you work in youth media or marketing and have an idea for a Ypulse Guest Post, feel free to email me.

The Question Of Campus Culture In Australia

When I left America in June of 2007, I remember watching in dismay as the little plane avatar on the video screen in front of me departed from California,   and made its way back to my  hometown of Adelaide, Australia. Or, what more accurately felt like the middle of nowhere. Though I hadn't traveled a lot in my year in America, the sense of being a part of the world was something I would come to miss immensely. In more ways than one.

It wasn't until Meredith asked me to write about campus culture in Australia that I finally came to the realization that we don't, in fact, have a campus culture. Not in the way I experienced in America. At my university we don't wear University of Adelaide sweatshirts, or have an official drinking song, or any type of  "Go Bears" rallying cry. But of course, this runs deeper than merely lacking a worship of sports and merchandising. The larger issue here is there is  just little sense of the shared experience that builds an identity as a university student.

The difference to me seems to be rooted in two main causes. The first is rather obvious, but its effects are widespread: Australian students generally do not live on campus. Living in Berkeley gave me my first taste of an independent life away from home. Here, aside from international students and those from rural Australia, people tend to stay with their parents when starting university.

The transition from high school to university here in Adelaide for me had mostly been marked by an easing of restraints and conventions – a shorter school year, no more uniforms, no more teachers enforcing good behavior and demanding work. Oh, and now there was a bar on campus. Which was good for boozing and socializing maybe, but the educational side of higher education seemed an afterthought. In the early days, conversations I had with others doing a Bachelor of Arts often revolved around how few contact hours we had every week. The craftier ones would deliberately arrange their schedules so they would have classes on as few days a week as possible. And while some would do this in America as well, the difference was that even when you didn't have class, you were still at school.

In Australia, we don't have college towns. Sure, around the campuses from March to November there is a large student presence, but there is never a sense of permanence. Students come in the morning (for the most part), stay for classes then leave for part time work or back to their homes in the suburbs. While a minority might regularly stick around for alcohol-themed socializing or participation in one of the few remaining campus clubs, university culture here follows a daily pattern of general swelling and dissipation.

It is not that students at my University don't do work, it's just that it seems to be done in secret, far away from the campus. I didn't even attempt to study in the library on campus here until I stayed on for an additional year to do an Honors course. In America I was living in a building with 220 other students, and there were always people around me studying whether it be in libraries, lounges or cafes around campus.

This leads me to the second difference: the pressure. In order to get into Berkeley on the study abroad program for a year, I did not have to go through half the hoops that full time students had to. Getting into university in Australia is a much simpler process, and much less competitive, especially for the lowly Arts degree. And once you are at university, the pressure for applying to further studies is also largely absent. Both Law and Medicine can begin as undergraduate degrees here, and Post-Graduate degrees require none of the resume building it does in America. The concepts of extra-curricular activities and caring about ones GPA were things I knew about only from watching "Daria" and "The O.C." While we technically do have them, the idea of building a resume to get into university or a post-graduate degree was, and still is, completely foreign to me.

The devotion to school and to working hard was infectious, and I worked harder that year than I had before or have since. Although as an outsider in America with no particular ambition for further study at a Law or Grad School program, I may not be in the best position to judge whether the extra pressure is beneficial or detrimental, I can't help but feel a little cheated by university culture in Australia. The more relaxed attitude certainly made things easier, but the tradeoff was that there was little sense of going through something with other people. The avatar of my plane hadn't just taken me away from California. It had also taken me away from the sense that I was part of something larger, part of a community of people willing to work and to learn: part of the world.

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Categorized under: Collegians, International

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