As anyone who’s met me knows my sense of direction is pretty much nonexistent so to say I was nervous for the first week of classes is somewhat of an understatement. After two weeks of orientation activities, beach trips, and essentially vacationing in Melbourne it was finally March 4th and to our group of international students that meant it was time to face reality (at least a little).
When the day approached it felt like we were all mimicking the “Stuff Study Abroad Students Say” YouTube video. Class? Oh right, class. This wasn’t just an amazing vacation after all. Classes were starting for the semester and we could no longer sleep till noon and stay out all night. There would now be papers to write and lectures to attend in addition to the exploring we'd grown so used to.
Going to school in Australia feels different from going to school in Baltimore though, mainly because everything is so much bigger at Monash than it is at Loyola (and I’m not just talking about class sizes). The campus here is big enough to fit at least five of Loyola’s evergreen campus and although the buildings are numbered their locations don’t correspond to any sort of numerical order. Unfortunately for my sense of direction this means that building 12 could just as easily be next to building 73 as building 13. Loyola’s campus, on the other hand, has a grand total of eight buildings on the academic quad so I’m not used to finding my way around a campus this large.
Despite all that while I was walking to class with my friend, Hailey, on Monday my nerves subsided. This isn’t so bad I thought...that is until I had to walk back to the residence halls. I’d spent the entire afternoon on campus with Hailey since we both had the same lecture--Buyer Behavior--but she had another class to attend and now I was on my own.
In the two weeks since arriving on campus it was the first time I’d had to walk anywhere alone and now, left to my own devices, I was completely and utterly lost. I was questioning myself on every turn. Was I really going the right way? All the buildings here look pretty much the same to me. After some wandering (thankfully in the right direction!) it became clear that for the past two weeks I’d more or less followed the others wherever we had to go without paying much attention to my surroundings. I arrived at my dorm later than expected with the resolve to do better the next day, and I did.
Waking up early enough to leave half an hour before my class started, I opened up the Monash University app I’d downloaded from iTunes the night before and set off. My new favorite feature on the app is exactly what someone like me needs: an interactive campus map that shows you where you are in real time. You can even tell it where you need to go and just head towards the little red pin point marking your destination on the map. Thrilled with my own personal GPS I wandered around campus still not paying any attention to which buildings I passed on the way (but hey I was staring at my map). Thanks to my Monash app I arrived to class with time to spare, which was much better than I anticipated.
Progress has definitely been made and after a week of staring at my map like a jaffy (Aussie slang for first year) I’m proud to say that although I still need the app to get to class on time, I now have a vague idea of where most of my classes are and I can get back to the residence halls on my own.
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