Challenging AUSMAT year

This is the AUSMAT year, a very crucial year of study which will determine my fate of being able to fly to Australia or not. The education system in the private college is no longer similar to that of in high school. Lecturers are not going to spoon-feed me with all the notes or information but just giving me the course outline and some useful links to enhance my understanding. We don’t usually have a proper textbook. What we have to do when we encounter problem in understanding some principles or what so ever is either seek help from lecturers or refer to references books where the chapters are usually not arranged in the same order of the course outline. I am not really used to this kind of study method initially but luckily, I have acclimatized to it now. However, since those reference books are international books, the explanation is usually very long and it really takes time to digest them. After reading all the tedious explanation, you might find that you have taken 30 minutes to read them but the information you obtain from them is actually very little. As a college student, it’s necessary for me to practice extracting information from long and full of words passages in order to save time. Time! Time is really precious to an AUSMAT student. I can’t waste too much time reading and to understand just one passage. Speed reading is vital and my intellectual level should be very high too.

AUSMAT is truly not an easy course and let’s not take it too easily. What we have to learn is very broad and we really need to be knowledgeable enough to answer the questions in examinations, especially for the EALD and Economics subjects. Evidences are required to support the answers we are going to write in the answer sheets. The sources of those evidences are generally origin from the books we have read, newspapers, online news, movies and so on. Lecturers do have gone through a few printed and non-printed texts, but that is not adequate for me to answer the paper. Those evidences can only be accumulated through constant reading not starting from now, but years and years back of time.

What to do if I have not been reading enough good books or watching enough meaningful movies when I was in high school? The solution is start to push myself to read more, particularly any reading materials in English and be aware of anything occurs not only in my own country but other nations too. Not only read to widen my horizon, but read to learn new vocabulary and think critically about the main issue in the books and movies. Critical thinking! This is the most challenging part for me apart from producing good essays and speaking English fluently in an academic way. I have been pushing myself very hard to sharpen my thinking skill and increase my knowledge since the beginning of this course. Hopefully all my hard work will be compensated with good results or at least, improvement in my English one day in the future. I don’t want to be like a frog in the well especially during English lectures. Every shows, books or popular stars in different fields that he mentions in the class, I would say that only 1% of them I know. My general knowledge is so little and I feel so shame to shake my head to tell the lecturer that “I have not even a single idea of who are you talking about (although they are the well-known people in this world)”. I feel so embarrassed to say “I don’t know” anymore that I just stare at him whenever he looks at me and waiting for my response.

I WANT to change! I WANT TO change! It is not only for academic purposes, but to increase my general knowledge. Seriously, I need to change. I have realized about this weakness of mine since I was in high school but I don’t know what’s the way out. Now, I got the solution so I should work for it! Gambateh! Gambateh! GAMBATEH!