Leaving the 'Berra

This week has seen a dramatic change in my attitude towards leaving. Up until this point, I've been so busy organising university places, and visa applications, and flights, and leave and luggage and all the multitude of other things that I thought I would never get together. I've passed the time daydreaming about what my trip will be like, and cursing how slow the time is passing and the monotonous waiting for things to happen. But this week, I've started noticing the things that I will be leaving. This week has been full of things that I've done 'for the last time' (must remember that I'm not dying, and will return to Canberra/Australia in just over a year), and people I'm going to miss.

30 sleeps and counting...

In exactly 30 sleeps I will be checking-in to my flight in Melbourne and getting ready to fly to London. Eek! Feels like my life is one big countdown at the moment. Here is a current checklist.

Wakefield Scholar, at your service...

So, five minutes ago I discovered that:

the Managers of the Wakefield Fund have awarded you a scholarship of 8,000 GBP for the 2011-12 academic year.

Which means that I'm getting just over $12000 to study at the Cambridge Institute of Criminology!!

Jesus College - soon to be my new home

For anyone who wants to know where I'll be living and studying at for the next year, I just found a youtube tour of Jesus College, which will be my new home in just under two months.

The video isn't all that interesting, but if you skip through it, you can see some of the key buildings and chapel, which are all quite beautiful. Very excited to be wandering the large grounds of this place soon...

In debt up to my eye-balls

Alright, it's official, I've become one of those annoying international students that pay exhorbitant amounts of money in order to study in a foreign country. Yup, that's right, I didn't get a scholarship, but I've decided to go to Cambridge anyway. Don't judge me.

Decisions, decisions, decisions...

After receiving offers to study in the UK, and realising that my ambition was actually achievable, I first had to choose where I was going to go, and figure out how the hell I was going to afford it. I read the fine print of the offers and discovered that even if I accepted an offer, I wasn't liable to pay it until I actually enrolled in the course (I hope this is the corrrect interpretation, otherwise I'm in a lot of trouble). So I continued my acceptance at Edinburgh, while also accepting Cambridge and Oxford. The latter two universities also require graduates to be a member of one of their colleges. I got offered a place in Jesus College at Cambridge, and Wolfson College at Oxford.

The applications

In August 2010 I completed a gruelling Honours thesis and vowed never to study again. By September, I was desperately seeking out Masters courses throughout the UK. My reasoning was that I could pursue further study, while also seeing the world. I have been on international holidays before, but I wanted to live somewhere and enjoy everyday life in another country. I figured if I based myself in the UK, with some of the world's best institutions, I could see a fair amount of the rest of Europe while I was there.