A Retrospect on Trimesters

A series of articles by Tommy Truong and Elton PJ Shih

Cramped into a room, the CSE Media team were hard at work brainstorming in their first meeting as a collective. So many ideas materialised for their videos, podcasts and webdev, and they came out with such vibrancy and enthusiasm. But for articles, the most serious of all mediums at their disposal, there was only one idea that could do it justice, trimesters.

And so the daunting task fell upon Elton and Tommy to deliver on dreams of their predecessors to write an article and pose the question,

Are trimesters actually good?

But why stop at one.

Over the next few weeks, the Media Team will be releasing a 3 part series written for the members that look into depth, different aspects of trimesters. We will endeavour to be as fair and partial as possible while still conveying the heartfelt feelings of students.

UNSW’s 2025 strategy looked to improve UNSW’s standing as a global university that would lead on research and teaching within Australia. The university’s new academic calendar, UNSW 3+, formed a part of UNSW's 2025 Strategy. Prior to the implementations, concerns were raised about the new system with considerable distress over the workload, stress and inflexibility of the calendar to meet the needs of students and academic staff. We look to see if these concerns have materialised and in particular this series will look at:

1. Sacrifice - an analysis of our trimester result survey
2. Alignment - connotations of a 'global' model
3. Compassion - a conversation with lecturers and tutors

Join us on this journey of discovery as we sift through the facts and provide you with the information to finally answer whether trimester are actually good. Without further ado, here is our first article in the series: Sacrifice.

For any questions or concerns please email [email protected].