College Calendar: University starts again for Michael

With a busy harvest over, it’s time to return to university for my second year of fun and frolics, with just the small matter of education to get in the way.

Freshers’ week is best described as hectic, and seeing it this year from an organisational point of view has been a fantastic privilege.

One of the main roles of the Students’ Union is to make sure that students have a great time while they study here, and the first week of term inevitably sets the benchmark for the rest of the year. With parties every night and activities every day it can be a logistical challenge to fit everything in.

One of the greatest things about going to university or college is witnessing the bizarre sights that you just wouldn’t get anywhere else. The finale of freshers’ week here at Sutton Bonington, for example, is the infamous “Sex Change” fancy dress party – which sounds far more disturbing than it actually is. Ridiculous theatrical drag is the order of the night for guys, while the girls wear any sort of rugby kit they can get their hands on. The effort that some of the guys put into their costumes means the bar can be a very scary place indeed.

Another tradition is the annual “Rumble in the Jungle” party – the only time in the year when we turn the dining hall into a proper party venue. A last-minute mishap meant the decorations never arrived, so one frantic shopping trip later we emerged with half a dozen fake trees and a handful of inflatable parrots, bananas and monkeys. The fantastic atmosphere that the dining room creates makes us wonder why we don’t do it more often – until the next day when it takes three hours to put all the furniture back.

Sometimes a relaxed and informal evening enables you to meet more people than at a huge party, and some of our “alternative” events were just as enjoyable as the main entertainment. The pub quiz proved as popular as ever, and hiring a chocolate fountain for the bar one evening set the scene for a warm and cosy night.

The freshers’ fair gave the new Agricultural Society committee its first official outing, and in keeping with tradition we managed to squeeze a life-size plastic cow into the assembly hall by way of a promotional tool.

The School of Biosciences at Nottingham – which encompasses the Agriculture and Crop Science divisions – is based at the Sutton Bonington campus, about 12 miles from Nottingham itself. As a result we have some of our own societies and sports clubs separate from the main university.

These range from Alternative Arts (which includes fire breathing and unicycling), to the Zoological Society, which is particularly well supported as the School of Veterinary Medicine is also based at SB.

Academically I am especially looking forward to my course this year as it sees a start to what most people would call “proper” agriculture. All Bioscience courses at Nottingham share a common first year, the aim of which is to deliver a sound understanding of the scientific principles we will need later on. This semester, however, I am taking modules that include “Economic Analysis for Agricultural Students” and “Applied Crop Science” – much more compelling (to me at least) than fundamental biochemistry.

As is usual with universities, Wednesday afternoons are left free from lectures for the purposes of sport, and at the first rugby training session of the year I was surprised by just how much fitness I had lost over the summer. Maybe a few hours each week would have been better spent in the gym than the tractor cab…

An extract from Michael’s entry

“If your only idea of an agricultural career comes from Country Life adverts, perhaps it is no surprise that it is regarded as an archaic, exclusive and backward profession. This isn’t the case anymore, although trying to convince my peers that agriculture is a more progressive industry than it used to be can be difficult. I try explaining why it is important that agriculture keeps moving forward. Telling them that we’ll have to double our food output within my working life to sustain a growing population seems to put the point across well. If I said that my job was to make a car twice as efficient I wouldn’t be laughed at. Yet doing exactly the same to cereal yields is somehow regarded as unnecessary. After all, we in Britain aren’t hungry now, so why will we be in the future?”

COLMN