Bendigo campus description:
First, I traveled to La Trobe’s Bendigo campus, about two hours outside of Melbourne across beautiful plains and rolling hills. Bendigo is a small city of about 100,000 people and 4,500 students study here. The campus is small, centralized, with living accommodations right on campus and a nature reserve in the back of it (hence the common presence of kangaroos on campus).

Academics
CIS has found that students love the outdoor education courses and I wanted to see what they were raving about. Met with Professor Andrew Brookes who explained that the campus has special facilities for outdoor education and recreation students, including lots of camping, biking, climbing, and mountaineering equipment.

Most outdoor rec/ed students have lecture classes of about 100 students and smaller tutorials of about 10-20 students. There is heavy emphasis on experiential learning and students are assessed on participation, small group work, as well as individual work. This campus is also home to La Trobe’s graphic design program, and I took a few shots of recent student work.

Student report:
I met Carey French, a student from the U. of Redlands in CA who is a CIS student studying here. She was positively on fire about her classes and the quality of academic instruction. Quote, “There’s no way I could have found a better place. The faculty is amazing.”

La Trobe’s Bundoora campus (main campus)
After a quick sandwich in the car, it was off to La Trobe’s main campus, called Bundoora. This campus is about a 25 minute train ride north of the city. It is beautiful and felt like an “American campus”, complete with centralized dorms, meal plans, and grassy spaces to hang out in. There’s a moat that runs around campus; not to protect from invading armies, but rather to water the playing fields (rugby) and keep the trees and birds happy. I found it really friendly and imminently walkable.

Student support
La Trobe offers an extensive orientation program for international students, complete with dinners, excursions, treasure hunts that take students throughout the city, etc.

Academics
Met with Assoc. Dean Tony Jarvis. La Trobe has some wonderful classes in international relations, global communications (read: media studies and journalism), and international development. The latter is developed in conjunction with OxFam and has non-governmental organizations involved in the teaching. La Trobe’s business and education departments are also quite robust.

Student report:
Had coffee with Eryn Opgenorth (biology major at Winona State U.) and Jean Louis (business and accounting major at Suffolk U.), both of whom CISers and lovin’ La Trobe. Eryn had just returned from a surfing trip (put on by the international office) and Jean had just returned from a weekend hiking and camping (again, organized thru international). They found it easy to adapt and make friends; found it more difficult to adjust to cooking for themselves, to the lack of free wireless (true all over Australia, pretty much), and to the loudness of the birdcalls in the morning hours.

Overall take on it all:
La Trobe is much more campus-like in setting than I thought it would be, and there’s much more student support than I expected at a large university.

Quick apology: I said in the intro to this blog that I’d be writing about the coffee. Well, to be truthful, the coffee hasn’t been all that. There’s instant coffee in hotel rooms, and of course, Starbucks located around the city, but other than that, the coffee is pretty standard. There’s “long black” and “short black”, long black being more the quantity that we gluttonous Americans expect.

Other interesting linguistics:
Tramping = hiking
Pushbike = bicycle
Runners = running shoes