I want to preface this blog entry by saying that people in Australia are meant to be speaking English but the truth is that they speak something that resembles English that’s called ‘English that is abbreviated unnecessarily often’. Unbeknownst to even the classiest of linguists words like arvo, avvo and parro sneak into your vocabulary and one day you wake up saying “oi, that’d chew so much petty hey” when referring to a car that would drink a lot of petrol. Much in the same manner I now only refer to university as ‘uni’ and thus ends my very long explanation of my blog entry title.
When I came to Australia 1.5 years ago to commence my university degree, not only was I scared of the fact that I was at university, but the fact that I would be attempting to string together research, based on pre-existing research, that was meant to be academically and intellectually sufficient in a second language frightened me unlike anything I’d ever experienced. I probably lost 20 kilos and 100 hours of sleep during my first semester due to excessively stressing out over oral presentations that were 3 months into the future. So what’s the solution? The easy option would clearly be to drink but since historically that impairs your thought-process and ability to speak I had to come up with a list on how to survive, which has worked for me and I thought I’d share it with you guys: