Prison work

Was talking with a classmate. He is a Muslim, moved from India to Australia as a teenager, and has a job working as a nursing assistant in a prison. He said the thing that shocked and surprised him the most working in the prison was condom distribution. Apparently they are very proactive in distributing condoms among the prison population in New South Wales.

Slave labor & British traditions

Apparently even after World War II, Australia continued its founding tradition that boats filled with immigrants (in this case children) were useful as cheap labor. The lost children

What *is* a professional nurse?

ok, I've just confirmed with a physical therapist from Italy (nursing school classmate) what is annoying us both. There doesn't seem to be much emphasis on actual medical knowledge, yet there's lip service to it. As in... there are poorly edited medical passages in the text book that are clearly just lifted from somewhere else, without an effort to adjust everything to the same level of complexity and understanding level. Then the lecture teachers clearly don't understand what they're talking about; they're just glossing over, and can't answer questions to the same depth as presented in the text. They have advanced degrees in *nursing* but have substantial gaps in their *medical* knowledge. (in lab, an instructor gave the wrong name for a major bone, and at least 5 of 20 students trained in other countries knew she was wrong).

University life - post cloud

I am now in my second week of going back to school to get a Bachelor of Nursing degree from University of Technology Sydney. There are about 800 students in my class, and it seems more are international students than students born in Australia. Unfortunately, I am paying 3x normal tuition because I am an international student, having not yet become a permanent resident. I've been out of work too long and am too old to waste any more time waiting, since getting employment has been more challenging than expected.

In our first week of class, we are given a huge volume of reading; lab policies, state policies regarding nursing, national standards, information about vaccines and police checks, and last but not least, volumes of homework reading. All of this reading comes in a variety of formats. Some publishers are still not on board with digital, so there are two huge, heavy text books, and a couple of smaller ones, there are pdfs, there are web sites with reading, there are journal articles that must be accessed through the library web portal, and there is a paper handout or two. Instructors are assigning reading snippets here and there in the textbooks, rather than following the published order.

Since international students contribute so much tuition cash, there is a lot of money put into advertising to attract them, and quite a flashy welcome. There are a lot of resources committed to getting students up to speed with writing quality. There is counseling for those who are homesick. Though all of the students understand English as a condition of admission, a fair number have apparently not conversed extensively in English.

One of the big challenges for everyone - it seems staff and the university included - is getting everything organized in the era of "THE CLOUD". The university is using a program called Blackboard. It's a good, comprehensive database connected to a typical, designed-by-accretion (which means messy and visually distracting) interface. To find anything for a class requires digging through multiple folders, and lots of links appear that are actually empty, not having yet been filled. I've found that the Android and iTunes Apps are actually much cleaner than the browser interface. However, then there's the matter of organizing your reading and downloads; keeping track of what you've read, and having it in a form convenient to refer to later. This is complicated by the fact that some files have different types of Digital Rights Management (DRM), so my efforts to download everything and keep it in one place is not an option. My anxiety at being behind in reading was compounded when in one class, the teacher held up printouts of required reading - which was not the same reading I thought I needed. I still haven't located in Blackboard the reading she held up.

One student said she's using iCloud - downloading everything into folders, then changing the color of the files as she completes the reading. Though organizing files in Android's "My Library" is pretty straightforward, moving files around in Android folders themselves is pretty clunky. Initially I used Evernote to keep some files; I haven't tried Google Drive (which might organize more effectively IF I can get various formats downloaded into it). The school doesn't expect everyone to have computers and tablets, and has invested heavily in rows and rows of computers for students to use. Admin has set up every student with an online desktop. You don't see this when you log in from home (you see the messy Blackboard interface, or one of dozens of other facility home pages), It's clear when you log into a school computer that perhaps it might be possible to organize things better from the desktop they've set up. That would be a great irony if THE CLOUD, in the process of liberating our data and making it multi-platform, is actually requiring us all to sit at the computer banks at school rather than accessing it from anywhere. Hmmm... I suppose there's a way to access that desktop from home - but I don't have time to mess with it. I need to focus on extracting required reading through Blackboard, since assignments are coming due!

Summary: the material isn't a challenge; the volume is a bit of a challenge; but the greatest challenge is accessing and organizing all of it. THE CLOUD is currently giving me a headache!

Australia: Wasting Human Capital?

In my first nursing class, I met a young man who has been in Australia for five years, but was originally from India. "I was thinking about studying mechanical engineering. Then I looked at the jobs available online. There were only about two jobs for engineers, and about 50 jobs for nurses. So I'm studying nursing."

My story is similar, though it's not engineering. I have over 20 years experience in medical laboratories. In the San Francisco Bay area, biotech is as hot as other information technologies. I was given a $3000 sign-on bonus the last time I was hired, and there are hundreds of biotech companies, a number of which can use the lab skills of someone trained and licensed in a medical laboratory. Here in Australia, there is a thin sliver of biotech. There are a handful of larger companies. There are lots of tiny three-person companies - they are PhDs or innovators who get their concept to working stage, then sell it off to a large company in the US or Germany. Unlike the San Francisco Bay Area, where there are hundreds of companies working their products up to full-level production, here in Sydney, the inventions get sold off before getting scaled to production. This makes a few PhDs wealthy, but rather than employing a range of aspiring PhDs in laboratories, aspiring PhDs are employed by academic labs (with constantly threatened government support), where the focus is more basic research than streamlining product to market.

It's been said that there just isn't the investment capital in Australia for biotech, and investors don't understand it. There *is* investment capital, but yes, biotech is not well understood, because the sliver of people with a science background is so thin. And because there are few jobs for people with those degrees, there's not much inspiration to study for advanced degrees in those fields. I was shocked, after taking a tour of Australia's one nuclear reactor, at a discussion of some schoolgirls who had also just taken the tour. "What do you want to do when you grow up?"

"Food service."

"Yaay!! Cool!! Waitress!" They were totally serious; totally excited about the notion of food service - and this was after getting the full public relations presentation of a very impressive nuclear facility. On the one hand, I've found it refreshing that the sense of egalitarianism here makes being a "tradie" as honorable as any other profession. It reminds me of growing up in Indiana - a state that also exports intellectual capital. Indiana only wishes it could have the tourism business that thrives in Australia - Indy 500 notwithstanding. On the other hand, I've been a bit appalled that in some respects Australia seems trapped in a colonial mentality, where a handful of administrators are getting wealthy selling off resources to other countries rather than using it to build local infrastructure. I had a discussion with a Chinese student who *is* studying engineering in Australia. He had to work as a cook for several years before Australia would grant him residency, at which point he could afford to go to school - because strangely enough, Australia thinks it has a shortage of cooks, while its engineers go begging for jobs. Or maybe it's a back-door to letting people in, because the cooks have less political clout than the handful of engineers protecting their turf? The Chinese student and I agreed that the main way to a larger economy is having a larger population, but the immigration philosophy is that people have to be kept out to preserve the quality of life for those already here. At any rate, it's a confusing economy that envies the U.S. but works really hard to preserve its status quo.

Do you speak English?

Interesting note regarding accents at orientation for international students at University of Technology Sydney (UTS) .  The presenter remarked in passing "some of you may have learned English from watching American television programs".   The presenter herself did not have a strong accent; what I would describe as a fairly "clean"  form of English.  However,  an Australian might describe what I say is "clean"  as being an "American"  accent.  In general,  Australians don't know a lot about American regional accents.  They probably don't know what they'd describe as an "American"  accent is actually the typical announcer voice in the United States which is fairly devoid of regional accents. So the classic "American accent"  is actually a form that may even have been practiced to intentionally strip traces of any regional accents. 

Similarly,  I was once listening to the radio and Fay explained to me that the announcers didn't normally speak the way they were speaking,  they were sort of poking fun of regional Australian accents.  I didn't even realize their "joke"  -  it all sounded like Australians speaking to me.  It struck me during the orientation at UTS that one person had a much more distinct Australian accent. He was the head of the security department.  The presentation consisted of the head of the international student department,  and a panel of about 10 people representing different departments or services.  The strongest accent overall was a guy who was probably from India,  representing IT services. I would not say that all of the others had "American"  accents,  but their English was,  again,  what I'd describe as "clean".  There is some sense that Australian's may be losing their accents for what is considered "American English",  but I would argue that the English of American announcers isn't so much "American"  but a form that's been stripped of American regional accents. So don't fear being overtaken by "American English" -  it's simply a form that different regions can understand as being stripped of accent.  Of course,  Southerners (in the US and Australians)  might refer to it as a "Yankee accent" -  which in the southern US means "northern".  But there isn't a specific place in the "north"  that is the origin of that "accent" ; if anything,  the source might be California,  a frontier of the melting pot which emerged as the source of much American media.

Summer Holiday

I don't think it completely sunk in last year... The "Christmas break" here is actually the launch of "summer vacation" for kids. School is actually year-round, but there are some substantial breaks here and there, including this extended one. School starts back up towards the end of February / early March.