The thing about tertiary education is this: the amount of time you actually spend with lecturers or tutors or whatever is practically zero. In a humanities degree, the average amount of contact time with faculty members, per module or unit of a subject, is two hours per week – one hour of lecture and one hour of seminar. All the rest of the study you’re supposed to do yourself. That’s a lot harder than it sounds. Without an A5 academic diary you’ll soon realise that you’ve doomed yourself to wandering uncertainly between lectures and libraries, never quite remembering what subject you’re supposed to be studying next or how long you have before the most recent essay is due in.
An example: let’s say you’re studying English Literature. You might have enrolled in a Shakespeare module; a Modernist Literature module; and a 20th Century American module. So you’re looking at 6 hours per week of contact time with your faculty. So far so good, right? That means you’ve got something like 30 hours per week free to do your reading and study in. You don’t have an A5 academic diary, though, and so you aren’t able to check when your next Shakespeare seminar is – or whether you have a sensible block of time after it to use the library before going to a lecture on black American literature after the First World War. Nor do you have any clear idea of what your essay titles for the term are; when they might be due in; or even how far you’ve got in terms of preparing for them.
The point, here, is that higher education is pretty much a trackless desert, a whacking great expanse of time and opportunity that usually doesn’t get used properly. With an A5 academic diary you’ll be able to make sense of that time, put some tracks in the desert. Then you can follow them all the way to a good class degree.
