I’m pretty excited for BF to start his course. It won’t be easy with both of us studying, but his workload will be pretty light in comparison with mine because his course is a part time one designed to fit in with work/family commitments.

The programme manager said if he did well she would be happy to write him a character recommendation for his application next year! Which is just fabulous – and she hasn’t even met him! We went to the info evening on Tuesday to find out more. At the mo it’s a bit up in the air because WINZ have confirmed they will pay his course fee for him. He’s been in to see his case worker, filled out the course participation application form, and received back a slip of paper confirming fees will be paid in five weeks (a few days before course starts, because “you never know what could happen in five weeks…” Yeah, okay.) Except the uni peeps say he needs to bring in a form to THEM, get their bank account number and get that to WINZ so they know where to pay it to. WINZ don’t seem too onto it. And I know they don’t care – no one is there to look out for his best interests – so we have to chase whoever needs chasing to ensure he gets everything sorted in time.

She also recommended he do one or two “learning workshops”. Apparently a lot of students haven’t been writing essays and stuff at university level and have been struggling. Which is understandable. But the workshops are pretty pricey – from $100, what’s up with that? At AUT they’re free. I did have a look around the Auckland Uni site and they do have other learning workshops which appear to be free or nearly free, but they’re not so in depth and they’re very specific. IE, instead of “essay writing intensive” there are workshops on referencing, paragraphing, writing to marking criteria, etc.

I figure I’ll be able to help him out quite a bit. We’ll take a stab and if together we can’t get him up to scratch then he can enrol in one of those. I mean, I’m a comms major, I did English a year ahead all through school, have generally always kicked ass at essay writing and tutored English for a bit. BF is pretty confident too, as always. Even when I told him that they’re phasing out special admission entry for over 20s, and he definitely needs a solid B+ to guarantee entry to a degree next year.