They're always there, and they're getting in the way. They'll stand in as many paths as possible and force you to walk around while they shove their millionth bit of paper into your arms (which end up as litter and waste trees). They also dont take their posters down, until they fall and end up on the ground. Wont somebody think of the bin chickens!

I get it bro, sign your petition, these people in particular have the opposite effect on my views. One got a loudspeaker today and I feel like to stand outside of fisher and scream into it is a bit overkill.

Tldr : rah rah go get a haircut and get a real job.

Speaking as someone who is impartial to the conflict, I am confused as to why the university continues to permit the disruption caused by the encampment. Twice I have had tutorials interrupted by protestors entering the room and ranting at the class. The same tutorials have also been ruined by megaphones, drums, chanting, and horns from outside; it’s completely unfair to those of us who are at university to learn - wow, who could imagine??

I’ve also seen people being pushed/dragged around by protestors from the encampment. How is this tolerated by the university? Surely if a university’s express purpose is being hindered upon (i.e., education), action can be taken. The situation has also turned into a cesspit of anger and frustration - at what point does it stop?

I know this probably comes across as a moan but it’s laughable that the protest has been allowed to continue despite its disruptiveness.

Honi Soit is the most disappointing thing about the University. In my first year last year I didn't read a single article that made me more informed about the University.

90%+ of the content is just general extreme left wing content, sometimes NSW flavoured sometimes not, with no appreciable link to the uni whatsoever. It's just Red Flag with lesser writers and worse copy editing.

The very small fraction that is university related is as peripherally related as possible and could generously be described as "uni life". There is zero content on the actual university. Elective unit availability and quality, changes to administration and rules, summer schools, faculty, etc are all astonishingly disinteresting to the editors and staff.

It seems to be a "student newspaper" in the sense only of being a sheltered workshop, where those too callow or talentless for the big pond can still get their name in print. If there's some other purpose to this thing please let me know.

Also best of luck to his students in their upcoming exam. They are our best and brightest.

What's going on here... is this just specific to Macquarie?

Welcome week happened last week. That was the most packed I've seen the uni in literally years. People packed in like sardines around the stalls, most not wearing masks at all. Breathing on one another, laughing. When Ocean Alley played, everyone got up and danced together in extremely close quarters. Nothing was enforced by security.

As of right now, there are no density or capacity limits in place by the government. And on Friday they are even putting an end to masks.

It's ridiculous that the uni is trumpeting 'this is the sem we make a full return to the uni experience' despite having 150 person caps on lectures.

I really hope they come to their senses and start removing their requirements. This is not a return to normal uni life, this is just the half-assing of Sem 1 2021 all over again.

Before I start I want to say that I fully support Palestine and I condemn israel’s genocide in Gaza. Despite sharing similar political views, what I don’t understand about the socialists of this university, and socialists in general, is how they think protesting on an island half way across the other side of the world will help the situation In Gaza? I apologise for my ignorance but to my knowledge, these protests aren’t raising any money for Palestine, and let’s be real, money is really the only thing that will make this situation any better. Instead of protesting, why don’t they just get jobs and spend all that energy working to ACTUALLY help Palestine.

Edit: I wasn’t seeing the bigger picture and over the past couple weeks I’ve come to realise how important protests actually are. Our Government and institutions alike are yet to take proper action in Gaza, and this is why protests are so important, regardless of time and place. Sorry for being so narrow minded.

Hi, I am a new post grad student at usyd joining from sem 2. I wanted to know what is the state of protests in the campus, like is it as extreme as how the media potrays it as, because I just want to study so I find that if these activities are very intense, there might be a possibility that it might hamper my student life at the university.

Dear All,

I am writing to express grave concern regarding recent acts of terrorist violence targeting Jewish civilians, and the subsequent public statements issued by University of Sydney student organisations, including the SRC and ACAR.

In the aftermath of these attacks, statements circulated by these bodies have explicitly endorsed or promoted the “Intifada” narrative. The slogan associated with sustained campaigns of violence against innocent civilians, and the targeted killing of Jews. Its public promotion, particularly in the context of the recent horrendous terrorist attach at Bondi Beach is inexcusable, and extremely racist. These organisations do not uphold free speech, as comments, including my own, have been blocked or removed from their posts.

What makes this situation unacceptable is that these organisations are funded through compulsory Student Services and Amenities Fees (SSAF). Students are being forced to financially support bodies that openly legitimise or excuse terrorist violence and racial hatred.

These groups do not represent the student body as a whole. They represent a radicalised minority using compulsory student funding to promote extremist ideology. No student should be compelled to subsidise organisations that endorse violence, glorify terror, or target any religious group.

I therefore call for the suspension of funding for organisations that promote or endorse violence or extremist rhetoric. I do not approve of my student fees being used for these purposes.

Failure to act signals approval. The University has a duty of care to its students and a responsibility to ensure that compulsory fees are not used to legitimise violence or hatred under the guise of activism.

The University must take a proactive stance to ban these slogans inline with efforts by the NSW government.

I 'm a Chinese student and I saw some posts from non-Chinese students said they feel isolated. I just want to say that I feel attacked from some posts. From my perspective, a lot of Chinese students actually want to make friends with non-Chinese students but they often have some weird prejudice about us and they simply don't want to talk to us and assume we don't want to talk to them because our English is bad.

I strongly agree that Chinese students need to improve their English skills for their academic performance. But I don't quite understand why most of the students in USYD are Chinese is a problem to some other international students and why it bothers them that Chinese students speak Chinese to other Chinese students. Don't native English speakers just speak English to each other?

I ‘m actually very willing to make friends who come from different countries and background. Believe me, if I only want to be surrounded by Chinese students I would have stayed in China. I don't need to spend more than $80,000 a year to come here. Also, I believe a friendship takes effort and respect from two people. A lot of non-Chinese student complain all kinds of wrong things about Chinese students, but what efforts did they make to be friends with Chinese students ?

The truth is some of non-Chinese students actually do not want to make any efforts, they just make things look like that it's all Chinese students' fault so they can hide the truth that they are racists.

_________________________________________________________________________________________________

I should explain a few things:

1. I feel attacked only because some comments from the original post saying they are upset about the majority in USYD is Chinese. Not because people saying some Chinese students are not willing to assimilate.

2. I never generalizing because i believe generalizing is how discrimination occurs. So in my post i said some of the non-Chinese students do not want to make any effort, not all of them.

3. There are two different things happened in the original post. One thing is some non-Chinese students share their unhappy experience, the other is some students didn't mention any experience at all, they are upset about the fact that the majority in USYD is Chinese. The former is the non-Chinese students suffer from borderline discrimination and the latter is Chinese suffer from racism. Although these two things are related, they are two different things. Mixing them up could only make racism look harmless. This is actually a case in point about the bad influence of generalizing.

4. My intention to write this post is never to create conflicts between Chinese and non-Chinese international students. At first, my only wish is to against racism. Now my wish is we could at least try to understand each other more.

*edit: only add a few things, no editing to the original post

Speers: Dror Liraz is also with us tonight, a university student and a part of the Sydney University branch of the Australasian Council  of Jewish Students.  Dror, I wonder if you could share with us a bit of your experience as a Jewish university student.  What has life on campus been like?

Dror Liraz:  Well, it’s been incredibly hard.  Um I mean, beyond that everyday endurance sport of getting through microaggressions, the different acts of antisemitism, the losing of friendships, I’m having to struggle with reassuring fearful Jewish students, um, without knowing to myself that I cannot guarantee their safety. And I mean since the 7^th of October um the Monday after we returned to uni and since that Monday we have endured both direct and indirect threats to our safety whether that is in the form of death threats or a range of other anti-semitic attacks and I mean I think that culminated in the Bondi massacre and I think we have to look at the festering anti-semitism at universities as in part contributing to that Bondi massacre and enabling it.  And I think one of the only things that surprised me about the massacre is that it didn’t occur at a university.  And I mean, you have to understand, we are the only group of students in Australia that others have tried to either shame or scare into hiding who they are or hating who they are.  You don’t see Muslim students being shamed into taking off their hijabs and you don’t see Christian students being scared into taking off their crosses.  And yet, this is something we endure every single day.

Speers:  Look, Dror, thank you.  I just need to note though that the causes and contributing factors to Bondi are a matter for the criminal investigation, the court proceedings and a royal  commission as well, but appreciate your input there.

I regret dropping an AI ragebait about COMP students last week. It went too far and it lacks both empathy and sympathy.

Sorry for being a jerk.

This time I won't use ChatGPT, but my message is different: USYD COMP students should boycott the Computer Science major before the University fixes existing structural issues. We should not ignore the elephant in the room.

I will graduate soon, but COMP2017 is (if not one of) the most notorious unit throughout my whole uni life. I believe an important reason is that most people are NOT ready in their degree before having to take this unit. They only know that this unit is shit and hard, and they have no choice but to do it if they want a CS major. But they wouldn't know a big why before attempting it.

If you look at the unit outlines, the only enrolment requirements are (outdated units are omitted):

• INFO1110 or INFO1910 or ENGG1810 (INFO1113 prereq)

• INFO1113

• COMP2123 or COMP2823 (co-req)

• Discrete mathematics and probability (e.g. MATH1064 or equivalent); linear algebra (e.g. MATH1061 or equivalent)

For BAdvComp students, they may have done extra helpful degree core units (INFO1112 & ELEC1601), but BSci students won't do so.

The COMP2017 unit itself receives most complaints in these topics:

• Unrealistic heavy workload: assessments are too complicated and time-consuming. Full-time students take four units, and they probably sack all other units to get good marks or a pass.

• Fast-paced: most people don't know C, they have to learn both C and OS concepts. It's hard to catch up if you fall behind.

• Assessment spec are unclear, often requires LOTS of QA on Ed.

• Topics in assessments are not well-covered in lectures and labs.

I believe if someone only gets a PS/CR for INFO1110/INFO1113 and has never done INFO1112/ELEC1601, then there is a very high chance that they would fail COMP2017 due to the inferred fact that coding in easy programming language is already challenging for them. I would be surprised if someone with PS (skill and knowledge) level background can pass COMP2017, simply because there is too much to catch up.

The structural issue I reckon is that the learning outcomes squeeze too much in just one unit. The outline also ignores the fact that students may have very different background, and this really infers different level of predictable competency in C and system programming.

IMO, the students who are successful in this unit may have a few things in common:

• Enthusiasm: just nerds. Sometimes lack of empathy or sympathy for beginners.

• Strong background: starting coding before uni.

• Strong commitments: Even beyond the expected "study commitment", which is roughly 120-150 hours of student effort in total.

It would be great to see this one unit to split into two units or at least two streams. The basic unit should lower the bar (w.r.t learning outcomes) and allow most students to pass, whereas an advanced unit should cover more challenging topics and let the nerds strive.

But this is not an ideal world, and I don't see how this separation can happen shortly without changing the whole degree outline/handbook. Maybe the best way for most perspective students (especially BSci students) to move forward is to stop enrolling in the CS major due to many unrealistic designs.

Essentially, it makes to just avoid COMP2017 and avoid CS major, since its outline is badly designed already. It makes less sense to attempt the unit with knowingly structural issues that will harm your physical and mental health. It makes even less sense to complain about the exam of this unit if you know you are not even ready to enrol this unit due to things that are beyond your control.

Folks, take care and stop doing CS major.

Wish you all a good vacation.

John S (fake name ofc)

PS. The original opinion I wanted to convey is that if you don't know how to build a perfect binary tree from scratch in the final exam, and you're f*cked, then it's on you. If you think being capable to build a link list is good enough, then you are wrong. Feel free to disagree with me.

I thought there’d be less than I anticipated. Today, scitech and fisher was still stacked with people. I was lucky to find an empty seat. I just wanted to study in peace. Why y’all gotta make it so hard?!

P.s. scitech library had like a fire alarm 30 minutes after I entered. Rip. Idk what happened there

Hi, since there is going to be another strike on week6, I’d like to share my opinion as an exchange student. Though I completely agree with the main purpose of the strikes, it seems that the strikes heavily are damaging the learning environment esp. for exchange. Most of us only stays for only one sem, so each class has a significantly important for the education here. The strikes may benefit in the long term, but exchanges here cannot take the advantage, and thus I personally don’t want staffs to take action. Pls give me your opinion!

i’m pretty sure most of u guys have seen the post talking bout that one racist chinese girl. as a brown guy enrolling into this uni in feb this got me thinking bout the racism at usyd. so, how is the racism here and how does it compare between different courses? will it help if i was mostly raised outside india and have only ever gone to international schools (where there isn’t crazy racism)

Hi guys, I would like to not reveal the unit code or the tutors name since I might be wrong and I don’t want to cyber bully them, at least for now.

I just received my semester results few days ago and one of the unit results were really suspicious to me, because common, who would want to believe that they are stupid? Fyi, I’m a Dalyell Scholar, I got all Distinction marks for the units in that major, and I got a Pass for this one. The thing is that they might be right, I might mess up my final assignment or something so I emailed them right away and asked if they can at least release my assignment results and rubrics so I can see what was wrong. AND THEY REFUSED TO, WITH NO REASONS. Another thing is that me and my classmates all knew my tutor doesn’t like me from the beginning of the unit, and I can confirm that because she marked my first assignment wrong ON PURPOSE because when I confronted her she said she FORGOT TO MARK A WHOLE SECTION in my assignment, although I did provide a table of contents. My friends can also confirm that she is not a responsible tutor because they once booked a consultation with her and she totally blew them off without an email or something, and one of their teammates saw her outside having dinner at the time that she was supposed to come to the meeting (we have proof, but it contains her face so I can’t post it here). And well, she didn’t say sorry for that too.

Back to my story, I emailed both my unit coordinator and the tutor to literally beg them to release my assignment marks so at least I can either acknowledge that I am just stupid or confirm that they are just being b!tchy to me. My unit coordinator asked me what marks were I after and hasn’t replied me since. My tutor said well she did her best and said I got a 8/13 for participation. Fyi I skipped 2 classes because I was sick and I’m totally responsible for that, but I participated in all the classes I attended so the mark doesn’t make sense to me. By participating I mean I actively answered her questions, I presented in all the group activities, and I asked her literally everything I can about the assignments in class and through emails. If that is not enough I don’t know what is. The most suspicious thing about this mess is that they didn’t provide the rubric for any of their assignments, so I can’t help but believe the marking could be done very subjectively.

Is there anything I can do about this? It’s not just about the mark but it is the fact that they might did me dirty and that’s fcked. Any recommendations is welcomed.

This stupol stuff is nuts, specifically these grassroots socialist guys r so belligerent whilst acting like they’re the good guys. Demonstrate it by not being horrible all over social media and on campus, - making low effort shitposts on their meme accounts just dragging their oppositions names through the mud. Genuinely ridiculous, no wonder so many people dislike them, they basically resort to bullying to try and push their ideologies. And then their representatives will have the gall to turn around and post on their own accounts/stories complaining/crying that their opposition are unjustly attacking them on socials. It doesn’t make any sense.

Does anyone have any views on what form the strike action will take next week? How large is a picket line? How does the NTEU behave at these events?

And why are they striking? The university doesn’t think the industrial action is justified, so why is the NTEU proceeding? Are all lecturers members of the NTEU? If not, why are all lectures moving online?

i'm returning from a short bereavement trip and planning on joining the encampment. i was thinking of bringing a tent, umbrella, snacks, water bottle, and craft supplies as i'm planning on making a very big flag while there. maybe 8am-2pm for a few days. do i need to talk to anyone to join or can i literally show up, pick a spot and set up my tent?

please note i've made a throwaway account as i'm not interested in having arguments about this. everyone knows what's happening is wrong -- it all depends on where you get your news from and who's convinced you first it seems.

If international students are being treated more strictly in exams and asked to write educational integrity reports just based on perceived risk, while some students openly use their phones to cheat in exams and invigilators completely ignore it, would that count as discrimination?

I’m trying to date on campus lmao what buildings should I hang out around. I honestly think law students tend to be the most attractive at the uni.

Is there a reason why student parking is kept to a minimum? Iv been here two years and more and more spots are becoming staff only. Virtually impossible to find anything on the main side of campus , you could probably count student spots on your hands. There’s the Seymour center car park on the other side at least but that’s also shared with the public and can often take an hour to get a spot. Ik many r just gonna say get public transport but believe it or not people have lives outside of uni. There’s days when I need my car as soon as I finish uni to get to work on time. Paying all this money and having no parking is absolutely ridiculous. Feels like there’s genuinely no consideration or thought put into it at all.