Nah, the systems are pretty different. Here, you'll study R-12. Your 12th grade exam scores determine your eligibility for university entrance. Medical and law school are usually their own thing. If you're a citizen, the government pays for your tertiary education and doesn't expect you to start paying it off until you reach a certain earning bracket.
Cool. It's always good to hear about how other people's education systems and such work.
43501 said:
I'm currently in my 3rd year of law school. Under ordinary circumstances I'd graduate at the end of next year and be eligible for practice, but I'll be switching to part-time next year due to circumstances beyond my control. It'll delay my graduation by about a year and a half.
I don't know about the specifics of your circumstances, but taking more time to graduate isn't necessarily a bad thing. In some respects, I would have liked to have taken more time on one or more of my degrees so that I could have worked during school so that I would not have had to have taken out student loans, meaning that I would have graduated with significantly less debt to pay off. That might not be as much of an issue for you based on how things work in Australia, but taking time and being able to enjoy life as a student isn't necessarily a bad thing, either.
43501 said:
So, what sort of stuff are you studying at grad school? Isn't that for honors/phd level study? I can see why it would be more demanding than what I'm doing now.
What I usually tell people is that I study musicology, which is the academic study of music. More specifically, I study ethnomusicology, which deals with questions about how and why people make music. We look at how music and dance are put together, their social, political, cultural, and historical contexts, and all kinds of stuff like that. My particular area of study is in Cuban music and dance, which means that aside from lots and lots of reading, my research involves things like dancing with people and talking to them about what they do. It could certainly be worse.
I just finished my Master's degree and am about to start working on my PhD.