Before the academic year begins around 1st of March each year, the modern university secures itself a little respite from the normal grind of being snowed under by an avalanche of undergrad applications for special consideration, extensions for assignments and what-have-you. At this juncture, with enhanced institutional prestige and a lucrative government funding payoff in the offering, universities are all about chasing the elite students and affixing them to the masthead of their little community flagships. Observe this piece if you will from a distinguished regional newspaper profiling one such high-in-demand student’s experience of the academic “horse-trading” that passes for the admissions phase of the tertiary ed year:
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The 99.95 country girl has the big smoke universities tripping over each other to gain her nod of assent
Date: January 2, 2015
Katerina Asbestocladding
Senior HE Writer
Whose $10,000 smells sweetest? Medicine-bound Ingressa is number 1 draft pick for the 2015 academic season!
Photo: Stefan Severedhead
It’s decision-time for wannabe uni students who must lodge their main round course preferences with the Universities Admissions Centre by midnight on Friday.
For some applicants with modest academic credentials they will take any offer they can get … even if it arrives, proverbially-like, in the mail by mistake (they wish!). Other super swots like Ingressa Alyen-Body of Girlambone Swamp, NSW, are in the fortunate position of being able to pick-and-chose between attractive offers from competing top-tier tertiary institutions. All the universities are chasing Ingressa because she attained the maximum possible ATAR score in the state, a percentile of 99.95. With the lure of a Commonwealth Scholarship worth $10,000 a year, both Sydney and UNSW Medicine Schools have put feelers out for the 2014 HSC over-achiever.
Reflecting on this, Ingressa (better known as “Miss Clever Clogs” around Girlambone) cheerfully indicated that it might come down to which university has the best daggy parties for brainiacs. So far the only universities to make Ingressa a firm pre-offer of a place in medicine are the University of Central Australia, Birdsville, and the University of the Warrumbungles in the Backabyond. Ingressa has rejected both of these universities outright, principally on the grounds (or lack of grounds) that she couldn’t find them on Google Maps.
Ingressa confessed to me in an exclusive interview for the Sentinel that she had been socially ostracised as a nerdy dork by her fellow students at Belanglo State Forest High School. “If it hadn’t been for the kindly old recreational activities teacher Mr Milat I would have been very lonely all the way through my school years”. Even the school’s Ur-Geeks Society which everyone else boycotts wouldn’t let me join, even as a quarantined associate. She was looking ahead to moving forward to an opportunity to make new friends at university … “18 years of unrelenting peer rejection must surely end”, she added in a tone befitting her sense of social isolation.
In the early 1970s one of the pioneering manifestations of this light-hearted form of imitation was an American book called Shrink Lits: Seventy of the world’s towering classics cut down to size, by Maurice Sagoff. This work took on the task of economising many of the best known classics of fiction such as Don Quixote, Gulliver’s Travels, Dante’s Inferno, Shakespeare and The Hobbit. The gruesome and brutal Old English epic poem Beowulf is rendered thus:
I seem to recall that Anthony Burgess in the Eighties published a list of the best (ie, “AB’s best”) Anglophone novels written since 1939. ‘Clockwork’ Burg provides an appraisal of each selection infused with his characteristic English snobbery and acerbity….the works are by authors of a certain homogeneous nature – a collection not surprisingly top-heavily British and overwhelmingly masculine.
The book comes in a handy, appropriately reduced size, 148mm x 90mm – just right for slipping through recession-shaped holes in coat pockets, losing on the bus, etc. Each verse is decorated with charming illustrations by that effervescent trans-cis Pacific cartoonist, Victoria Roberts. Victoria is really good at giving the countenances of her creations that look of crumbled anxiety, perturbed faces conveying a sense of harassed humanity in the onslaught of a perplexing post-technological age. Not only that, she is extra good at drawing kangaroos and dogs!
