Asek
Banned deucer.
melbourne's a beautiful campus, tons of parks and nice gardens around, a few good cafes and bars, and really close to the city and nice places to go out. i live at home so i can't really comment on accomodation. i really like it but i mostly chose the university because i used to live nearby.
i'm actually a physical chemist, graduated with a bachelor of science with honours yesterday, and got a phd offer with a government scholarship today to start next year. watch out for the student portal though: i'm trying to reenrol in the new degree and it keeps freezing up.
hehe my bad, memory failed me. Ripper work on what you've achieved though, thats really something to be proud of, good luck moving further in your studies, getting offered a scholarship is awesome haha. Glad to hear melbournes a nice place as well, i was mainly choosing it for the academic reputation but I was hoping it had a nice campus as well, and it sounds like it does, so thats swell.
Thanks also for the input on accomadation jumpluff (congrats on your scholarship also, 15k scholarship must mean your a pretty top tier student haha). I'm a country boy (live in sorrento / portsea if you've ever heard of it, pretty popular tourist spot over summer), and its a fair whack away from any sort of university. My two choices for accomodation are either staying with my grandparents (who can only speak very very basic english) who are likely a 40~ ish public transport trip from campus (can't put exact time on it very rarely have I used trains and even rarer still trams), or sussing out student accommodation in the area. I don't have any friends going to university (all tradies / tafe), so I can't really try to do one of the shared rooms with people I know, so I'll be in with randoms if I take a shared room option (though who knows, they may be really cool people!), and I highly doubt I can afford a one person room. I'll also have to finance the apartment, and a lot of the leases have contracts that require you to stay for a longer period of time than what my uni season will likely be, which is undesirable as in break I need to labour back home to make some money and catch up with all my mates, not be stuck in the city running out of money!
Weighing it up to stay at my grandparents means I get 'free' (still have to pay for internet + help with some of the bills) stay, and can have reliable cooking, washing etc done whilst im out at the cost of having a much longer time spent on transport each day. On the other hand student accommodation is much closer, but costs much more, and leaves a lot more of the housework kind of stuff burden on me (I do know how to wash, cook, clean etc as i do it for my siblings whilst mums working, but its still a hassle I could always do without). I'll enquire on accommodation early as per your advice, and if I can find something that suits I'll be likely to snag it, but from what I've seen there's nothing thats really doing it for me, and to make matters worse I live too far away and am working full time + weekend work over summer, so I can't even check out these places.
Thanks for the help once again both of you; appreciate it a lot considering this will likely be a huge lifestyle change for me.