a journalism experience

“What is semesterisation?”…“Are we part of the semester scheme?”… “Are we not in terms then?”

Sigh… Just a handful of the responses I got when asking students about what they thought on the matter of being semesterised at Bournemouth University. Although I’ve got to be honest, I didn’t know what it meant either so how was I supposed to get a decent response when we are all so unaware?

The issue wasn’t about approaching people. That was fine. Most people were happy to chat, as they had probably been given a similar task in their time so I guess they knew the feeling. The difficulty was in the fact that most students were actually completely and utterly unaware of the semester scheme, therefore in turn didn’t have much to say about the matter. Great start to a story I thought. Then I thought again. And a little more. Perhaps this was my angle! BOURNEMOUTH STUDENTS UNAWARE THEY ARE BEING SEMESTERISED. Needs a little work I know…

So why don’t students know about this? Have they not been given efficient information? Now this is when I began to get my reponses.

One student told me “We aren’t told anything. Yeah sure there might be an announcement on MyBu but usually that’s just something I skim read and if it doesn’t explain exactly how it will effect me then I won’t pay much attention”.

I found that it was a lot easier to get a conversation out of a student when they had the chance to complain! On the other hand, the staff were much harder to firstly track down and secondly get enough information out of. I literally couldn’t find anyone. I started thinking that they heard about our journalism task and were all hiding away under the desk in their office. Perhaps they too knew that the semester scheme wasn’t quite explained properly to us poor students.

Finally, I found a lecturer but unfortunately they were on their way to a meeting so the response was short but sweet.

“The semester scheme has been put into practice so that both staff and students can have an easier life when it comes to their allocation of modules and so far we’ve found it’s worked quite well”.

That was suffice enough for me! As long as it’s working then it’s okay right? To be perfectly honest if I didn’t know what it was in the first place and wasn’t aware of any change then why should I mind if we’re being semesterised or not?!