Interview with former Honours student Astrid Lorange, winner of the University Medal
"I was originally enrolled in International Studies in combination with my undergraduate degree, which was Writing and Contemporary Cultures. Towards the end of my third year, I realised that I was really making progress with my studies in poetics and language and I was beginning to discover what area I wanted to tackle (on more of a long-term basis)."
Former Honours student and winner of the
University Medal, Astrid Lorange
"I found Honours to be a chance to really focus on the area I was interested in and concentrate on one thing rather than the glancing that I did in my undergrad. Of course, having said that, it is still on a fifteen-thousand-word project with a limited timeframe, so now I'm hunting down a longer fix, a PhD or Masters."
Having completed her Bachelor of Arts (Honours) in Communication in 2006 and receiving the University Medal, Astrid Lorange says that Honours provided her with the freedom to concentrate on and explore a specific corner of her studies, following her undergraduate degree. Her Honours work was a critical essay written in three parts, looking at the early modernist poet and playwright Gertrude Stein alongside three more contemporary writers (David Antin, Lyn Hejinian and John Cage). Her thesis studied the compositional links between this earlier work of Stein's and newer poetry.
Currently in the process of applying for a PhD or Masters, Astrid says that one of the most enjoyable things about Honours was the constant intellectual stimulation, which she was able to share and feed off from other Honours students.
"I really enjoyed spending that time at home with lots of books. It was a luxury. All three of us at home were writing theses and we would stop for wintry feasts and pots of coffee and help each other out. I really missed that intellectual and domestic intimacy when it was all over."
Reflecting on last year, Lorange says it is difficult to imagine doing Honours any differently.
"My whole process was fraught with the anxiety of not knowing how it would all end up. It wasn't an uncomfortable anxiety; it is just the way I naturally work. It meant that I agonised over every word and sentence of the thesis, carving it into as tight a piece of language as I could. I know that at the time I was exhausted by my approach, but now that it's all over, I can't really imagine doing it any differently."
"I guess [doing Honours] urged me to be less anxious during the process of writing, but I don't know how good I've been at following my own advice. I definitely learned how to manage time effectively in terms of planning for a project, although these things are always fluid notions that are continually negotiated."
She says that the biggest misconception among Honours students is "that you must have a thesis plan at the beginning of the year that you will stick to. My original thesis plan was remarkably different from what I ended up writing: my initial interest was with poetics and language in the specifically spatial context of the city. During the first semester of course work, my ideas (not only for my project, but about poetics in general) changed radically, mostly as the result of the work I was reading in the Honours writing workshop. I talked to my supervisor, who was very excited about the change in direction, and decided to go with it.
"Another misconception is that your life must stop for a thesis. There is certainly a time, in the last four or five weeks, where you start spending a lot of time on your thesis, but the misconception that you 'will not have a life' is ludicrous. You still need to do the small, good things that are pleasurable because these things keep you from becoming despondent."