Free advice

This is worth its weight in gold. At $135 it prints at around 2c a page, 1200dpi. That makes it cheaper and better than the uni printers who charge around 14c per page.

A word of warning

To anyone planning on starting a graduate entry masters in speech pathology at UQ.

You will need to make sure you have or can get the following things.

- A dictaphone, preferrably digital, with digital output to a computer if you know what you're doing.

- A work uniform, smart casual, for clinical placements.

- The course text

- Lots (I mean a lot) of photocopy credit.

These things will make your life easier if you have them before the program starts.

In addition once it begins make sure your blue card application is away ASAP or you'll have trouble finding kids to observe. Make sure you get an early start on finding an old person (65+-) to interview as they're really tricky to find, and no, I don't know what you're meant to be doing for assessment either.

I wish I was still doing anatomy, at least I knew what they wanted accomplished for assessment.

Back to work

Parents of Australia, did you know that funding to assist your child is allocated not based on the global assessment of a competent practicioner but on a score on a test normed for an American population. If your kid has a serious problem but doesn't score low enough on a test compared to American children, they won't get the funding they need to help them. Cheery thought.

Anway back to the grind of uni, started SPCH7801 today which is an introduction to speech pathology, I haven't got my immunisations done yet, still have to do some painful TB thing which should be fun. I also have to find a 4 year old kid sometime next week and administer a test to them, which should be as enjoyable as herding cats, then I get to find someone over 65 to test them too and report my observations. Tempted to just google and pretend I found some model subjects but I'll probably go through with it, at least it'll be interesting.

This post is brought to you on a laptop running Linux, I'll be taking this very machine to uni from now on seeing as how our notes are in powerpoint and thus are easily editable. I've pretty much stopped using windows except to play games.