Postgrad Students 2011

Jellytotsx wrote: »

Any idea when our lectures actually start?Hate not knowing how everything is going to go and when everything is starting!

I was in talking to Ann this morning in the History Department and they got my deposit and everything's all good She told me that our Hdip modules begin on Monday 19th even though we don't register 'til the 22nd. We will get all the information about the course and our electives later on during the week, possibly Wednesday. Hope it helps!:)

Your Text Here wrote: »

Thanks for posting that KingKazama! Saves me from having to go into the dept office tomorrow now :P

No problem at all. Name's Padraig btw. Can't wait to start now:D

Would love to be going for the Wine reception (free wine!) but my induction day is Friday and it was hard enough getting off work for that i dont think "but its for free wine!" would cut it as an excuse

Yeah, absolutely. I think it's pretty sad if you can't laugh at yourself. It was stupid of me to expect anything approaching useful information so I shouldn't have bothered showing up at all.

I didn't think it made the SU look at all bad. Don't see how it would. If anyone wants to point fingers and say 'they' look bad, they might point at the graduate studies office for being badly organised, and perhaps it didn't reflect well on the dean of graduate studies for her speech about excellence leading into a sloppy situation. But I don't think I'd hold it against anyone particularly, and I don't think it would be helpful. It was just a bit of a screw up, that's all. Everybody screws up sometimes. Whoever was on before that guy mentioned something about finishing up a little early. Once yer man was done and none of the organisers were actually in the room, it was natural in my opinion for a bunch of people to assume that was that. There should have been someone from the graduate studies office in there at all times, letting people know there was someone else coming or whatever. They probably just lost track of time, but they still should've had someone in there, they shouldn't all have left.

In any case I, and a bunch of others, were leaving as soon as the break was coming anyway. No staff in the room, so why not assume that was the break? But the reason for me leaving was that as far as I was concerned there wasn't a single thing that could not have been shared via email or simply read off the site, whether right then, three weeks ago, or whenever they get around to updating their pages properly. That's why I was angry. When I said I shouldn't have expected useful information, I should have elaborated. I didn't mean the information itself was useless or irrelevant, simply that there was nothing there that I couldn't have gotten from the site or a mail. And that goes for the handouts and booklets too. They didn't need to be printed, all that wasted money and paper. Talking about austerity and cuts and then spending who knows how much on glossy colour printed booklets and so on? Should've kept it at PDFs on the site. Emails.

Besides that there was a little misinformation too, both in the talk and in the graduate studies handbook. For instance the lady assuring us we could pay the 93 in any way we wished. Yet last night I went to the fees site and there's a big notice there saying they accept nothing but giros. It's not like they took the summer off as well, they've had plenty of time to organise things and proof read and check their links and facts. It was a bit sloppy, that's all. By all means make it compulsory for those who haven't been going to NUIM for a bunch of years, it was absolutely all relevant for them, but the rest should've been told all the information is either already online or will be once the sites are updated. Lot of people aren't able to afford unnecessary travel and expenses. This was unnecessary. That's money I could've used on a second hand textbook. It's time that people didn't have to waste, it's people organising child minders or lifts or trains or days off work or whatever when they really didn't have to.