Sometimes, I like to take a break from saving the world to actually attend some lectures. However I've noticed that a lot of people tend to be breaking the unwritten guidelines of behaviour during these sacred times. So what follows are some of what I consider to be the more important ones.

Falling asleep in a lecture is pretty common. Sometimes it's because you've been up studying all night and other times it's because a darkened room is very conducive to sleep. I have nothing but respect for the noble state of the sleeping scholar. Their gentle nods of the head, the hunched way they sit over their notebook and the startled look on their face when the lights come back on at the conclusion. However the snoring scholar is something I believe every lecture can do without.

It's five p.m. You've spent the whole day in the library desperately scribbling away to get your paper on 19^th Regency era Romance Literature finished before your next class. You haven't had time to eat because you've barely had time to sleep. Finally you drop the assignment into the box and head to the final lecture of the day. You sit down, barely able to keep your eyelids open, and someone sits next to you. They pull out a sandwich they have obviously just purchased from the food court. Its smell is intoxicating. You believe that you could subsist entirely on the mere idea of this sandwich. You lean over and gently bash the owner of the sandwich unconscious and claim your reward. This is why I advise against eating delicious food during lectures.

I am actually guilty of this one myself. I like to take my laptop into lectures so my notes don't devolve into doodles of penguins and spaceships. I respect that some lecturers dislike seeing laptops open during lectures as they believe, sometimes quite rightly, that students will fritter their lecture time away by idly clicking 'refresh' on Facebook. I have no problem with this. My problem rests with the personality type known as the “aggressive” note-taker. This person will tap away at their keyboard as if every single key has committed a grave sin against them and must be punished. It would be an exaggeration to say that it can be hard to hear the lecturer but honestly it's still pretty intrusive.

Finally we come to the talker. This person hasn't seen their friend in forever and will engage in an energetic conversation with them about topics as diverse as politics, literature and whether or not one of them saw what was on the telly the previous night. Catching up with friends is an activity I wholeheartedly endorse. Catching up with friends when the lecturer is attempting to explain the finer points of a topic is a crime I would welcome the death penalty for.

So there you have just a few simple rules that really do make me sound like an old man complaining about the kids on his lawn. I only have this to say in my defence; in at least one lecture in all my time at Murdoch I've been in breach of all four of these guidelines. And yes, the title is completely misleading and unrelated to the topic.

It can sometimes be hard to write this blog. As I've mentioned in previous posts and I have clearly outlined, or at least I hope I have, in the disclaimer Murdoch does officially endorse the blog and compensate me for certain posts. This doesn't mean that I am going to necessarily always be positive about them and Murdoch have stressed to me that they will not attempt to censor me. With that said I will now discuss my opinions on the Murdoch Open Day on August 22^nd.

When I was 17, all those years ago, I was given the day off College to attend the Sussex University Open Day. It was pretty cool being given a day off to wander around a campus for a couple of hours and I had made plans to meet some friends in Brighton afterwards. I hadn't given any thought to University at that stage so I was thoroughly unprepared for what to expect. I had no idea what major I wanted to pursue and next to no clue if I was even going to be living in England for University. As you can imagine this made the whole open day experience less than pointless as all I did was walk around with a group of friends and complain, if I remember correctly, about how boring the whole process was. In short I was immature, annoying and completely unprepared to even think about University.

Murdoch's open day, compared to the rather subdued Sussex one, was more like attending a carnival or festival. There were tea-cup rides, face-painting, competitions and a fairly impressive band line-up. If anything it seemed like there was so much to see and do that the prospective students didn't really have a reason to engage with the lecturers which is the whole point of an Open Day. Luckily the people attending this event seemed to be a bit more mature than I was on my first Open Day and I saw a lot of lecturers being asked questions and a lot of information being given out. All in all Murdoch gets points for being very informative and that's really what these days are about.

The razor in the candy-floss though is that all the attractions kind of distort what a typical day on campus is actually like. There aren't always tea-cup rides and petting zoos on campus, we seldom get bands performing live on Bush Court and you'll be lucky to get churros on any day other than the Open Day. I know the attractions are fun and only meant to be a diversion and I am not saying Murdoch put them on for any other reason, but if Sussex had a similar show I'd likely have tried harder to get a place there and perhaps regretted it as I would have missed out on my Australian experience.

The reality of campus life is that most of the time you won't be able to simply lounge around on Bush Court and enjoy the sun. You have work to do, often a lot of work, and when you're out on Bush Court its likely that it will be to read something for an upcoming tutorial or to do a last-minute bit of studying. Sometimes the Guild will put on an anti-stress day and it can be fun to visit the petting zoo or get a free drumming lesson but like I have said, these days are few and far between.

So in my own roundabout way I am telling you that you shouldn't base your decision solely off the Open Day. Universities will use them to put on their best face, and who can blame them? If you choose Murdoch simply because 'it had the best attractions' or 'was the most fun' then all I can do is caution you to re-think. If you came to the conclusion that Murdoch is the University for you through research and backed that up by attending the Open Day and talking to the relevant Unit and Degree Co-ordinators then I think you've got the point and are a very different person to me when I attended my first open day.