Freshers Fair

My first day off from lectures and it's so nice to have Wednesdays to myself again. Last year, Wednesday afternoons meant Spanish lessons and whilst everyone else was enjoying their time off, I was stuck in the Arts Tower overlooking Sheffield from the eighth floor and not being able to enjoy the magnificent view. I was woken up by a phone call from my friend who was in the queue for the freshers fair, trying to find out where I was - expecting me to be around the university somewhere. I have gained a reputation, along with him, for liking freebies and bargains but I had completely forgotten that today was the day of the fair. He had been queuing since 10am when it opened and was still queuing at 11am when he phoned. After that I decided that it was probably time to get up and that I would go down after breakfast and hope that the queue had died down a bit.

Sure enough it had and I managed to get in straight away. This year however was one of the most disappointing years in terms of giveaways etc and ever since my very first fair (when I was actually a fresher) it has been getting progressively worse. I suppose it is understandable that promotional materials have to be reduced in order to cut costs during these difficult times but you also need to encourage student to use your services and buy your products. Admittedly there were a lot of coupons and discount cards flying around which I suppose are more effective in the long term but even the big companies that had been there the last two years like Warburtons the bakers were not there this year and they were the ones who bucked the trend by actually trying to sell something (heavily discounted of course but they were still asking the students to hand over money).

I have finally managed to get started on research for my dissertation and spent the rest of the afternoon in a battle with Google Scholar, the online university library and ACM, a web portal with a vast collection of computer science related e-journals. My problem was that despite the university paying to subscribe to these places so that as students we have free access to them, ACM kept telling me that I needed an account to read the full articles. After creating account it then told me that I needed to pay to subscribe to the relevant services in order to view the document. Some of the journals I managed to find via the university's online catalogue which bypassed these pages and authorised me to view some of them however, the search engine is no where near as complex or as good as Google (and who could blame them) but it was annoying that ACM didn't have the ability to create an account with affiliation to an educational body that would then allow you to view the articles or at least provide a link so that you could be authorised.