Learn about the Master of Landscape Architecture

Phillip Bilsk (00:00):
All right. Hello. Welcome. I'm Phillip Bilski. You would have met me over email once or twice already before we have got to our intention, but hopefully I'll be meeting you in person. So, welcome to RMIT welcome to the Master of Landscape Architecture. I'm the program manager for the Masters of Landscape Architecture. And before we officially start, I'd like to play another welcome.

Natie Carolyn (00:36):
[foreign language 00:00:36] Welcome to our beautiful home, the land of the two great bays. Congratulations on your choice to study and start your journey, your learning will lead you to reflect on new ideas, opportunities and guidance in your direction. 2000 generations of our ancestors engaged in learning on this land. Learning is passed on through knowledge and story. I welcome you to reflect on this, connect to your learning environment and respect the laws of the land. Banjo taught us to always welcome guests, but he required us to ask all guests to make a number of promises. One, not to harm the lands and waters and not harm the children of Banjo. Wishing you well with your studies here in RMIT.

Phillip Bilsk (01:49):
All right, thanks to Natie Carolyn for that welcome and sort of response to that, I'd like to acknowledge the Woi wurrung and Boon wurrung people of the eastern Kulin nations whose unceded lands we conduct the business of the university. So, it's our wise duty or our due to provide an acknowledgment and a response to that welcome from RMIT's senior elders and residents and to kind of recognize that there's a spirit of generosity from Natalie's welcome, that it is a welcome to the lands on which RMIT University is. But it's also an invitation, a welcome to learning and to your studies. And sort of saying, Wominjeka, there's also a double meaning there, that it's a phrase denoting, of course, welcome, but also as a question or it implies a question of what is our business? So in our sort of case, we are being welcomed onto these lands but being welcomed with a purpose. And that purpose is to learn.

Phillip Bilsk (02:59):
So over the next hour, which actually much less than an hour because we're going to skip through a few things, will essentially be introducing you to the landscape architecture discipline at RMIT and a few of the different kind of services that RMIT offers. So I've put up the kind of original schedule here from what we would normally do, just to give you a sense of what we would normally do when we're not just watching this over video and instead we're all in a space together. So normally we'd kind of run through this kind of welcome, and introduction to landscape architecture at RMIT, as I'm doing now.

Phillip Bilsk (03:39):
We'd also have a number of people come to speak to you directly. People from the student union, from the Australian Institute of Landscape Architects and so on. So in this case, I'll be covering some of that content. In other cases we'll essentially hope to do that at a future orientation. So, for example, because our learning is online this semester, we're not going to be sort of introducing how to gain access to the workshops in the RMIT design hub. Instead, we will kind of rerun orientation next semester, hopefully in person where we can kind of do those things in person and do a kind of proper introduction to everyone.

Phillip Bilsk (04:19):
So, again, normally we'd have run through these slides and then have a kind of guided tour and a kind of a welcome event. Obviously, we're not doing that. Now where you just have the slides and the video that we hope to kind of do a reorientation session when we're back in the building and we're all able to be back into the same space safely together. So next up, we do have one or two people who'll be dropping into the video, the next person who will be dropping in is our associate dean. So the associate dean of landscape architecture at RMIT is Katrina Simon. And she's also recorded her own portion of the video, where she'll sort of introduce landscape more broadly. And what we sort of how we see landscape architecture at RMIT. So I'll throw to her video now.

Katrina Simon (05:13):
Hello, my name's Katrina Simon and I'm the associate dean for landscape architecture here at RMIT University. It's a great pleasure to welcome you to the MLA orientation. And normally we'd be in the same room but in these current circumstances, it's still marvelous that we can actually communicate digitally. So, I extend a very warm welcome to you. I'll just give you a very brief overview of where landscape architecture sits within our school and just a tiny bit of an introduction to my own work in landscape architecture. So we are in the RMIT School of Architecture and Urban Design. There are three disciplines within the school, the discipline of architecture and urban design. Landscape architecture discipline and interior design discipline.

Katrina Simon (06:03):
This is an overarching statement that we have for our discipline, really, I guess, contextualizes a lot of the drive behind the work we do. Landscape architecture works with many of the things that people love the most. Plants, gardens, parks, plazas, seasons, rivers, coastlines, communities and memories to address many of the things that they fear the most. Climate change, environmental degradation, loss of the natural world, disruption, which we are experiencing a great deal at the moment, and drab uniform public spaces.

Katrina Simon (06:40):
The RMIT landscape architecture discipline works across a range of creative ideas, living systems, physical materials and future possibilities in order to design significant, productive and workable spaces in which people and other living beings can live and flourish. And it deploys a range of innovative design methods and techniques to envision, investigate and propose better ways of living in a complex, uncertain and rapidly changing world. RMIT offers a professional design training in landscape architecture through the Bachelor of Landscape Architectural Design program, which is a three year program and a professionally accredited Master of Landscape Architecture program which is what you're involved in right now. It also offers a master of disaster design and development in online and intensive mode for people wanting to transition their careers into the disaster management and humanitarian sectors.

Katrina Simon (07:35):
So just to give you a very tiny insight into some of the things that have inspired me working in landscape architecture, I have three particular areas of research interest. So, I'm developing a fourth. These would be cemeteries, cities and maps. In these images, Père Lachaise cemetery in Paris, France. It was a very significant new type of landscape, even though now to us it seems very traditional and in a way it is a very recognizable type of landscape. But in its day, in the early 1800s, it was actually a new kind of landscape that was designed for burial in the city. And when I showed these slides last time afterwards, several people said why a cemetery is interesting? And I guess I've just always found them an amazing, they're like a microcosm of the city. They're like a tiny version of the city. They're incredibly varied and they're incredibly often incredibly beautiful. And they tell stories of individuals, but also of larger societies. And over the time that I have done projects on cemeteries, both for competitions and through study and other processes, I've really been interested in this question, which is how is memory embedded in urban landscapes and what happens when those landscapes change?

Katrina Simon (08:51):
Cemeteries change very rapidly. Almost as soon as they're established, they start to wither. And so this landscape that's built to perpetuate memory of people, starts to change and decay itself. And so that changes the sense in which memory can be retained. This beautiful tombstone where the tiny engraved letters get the water and the water then makes a condition for moss to grow. So it starts to almost become a new language. So for a long time, I was interested in this as a fairly abstract, almost theoretical interest. And then the city where I grew up, Christchurch, New Zealand, experienced a series of very devastating earthquakes. They really radically changed the urban fabric. They disrupted every facet of social and human life and non-human life. And now it's almost nine years, it's actually nearly 10 years since the first of these earthquakes. The earthquake sequence went for about two years of thousands and thousands of aftershocks.

Katrina Simon (09:54):
And so, in a way, this brought this interest in memory and how memory is embedded in landscapes much more to the fore. And it was actually something that a lot of people were talking about and it became a real issue for the city. How should the city keep changing, given all of these things that had happened to it? This is an aerial photograph taken from a drone of a part of the city that used to be a suburban area. It had individual houses, each had their own garden. And this was an area of the city where the ground was so badly damaged. So it lost its strength and it started to behave like a liquid. And so a large area of about 500 hectares was deemed to be uneconomic to repair in terms of the infrastructure.

Katrina Simon (10:37):
So those houses over a period of time were removed, the driveways were removed. The ground, the floor plates were removed, the fences were removed. And what is left is actually the gardens and the boundary planting. And so it's this extraordinary landscape that is at once very domestic and quite intimate and very familiar for anyone who's grown up in that kind of environment. But it's also vast. It goes on and you can walk for about many, many, many kilometers in this slightly strange, not quite a garden, not quite a park, very unusual landscape. We still a debate about exactly what will happen to this very, very large area of land in time. But it is in part being turned into an extensive walkway that joins the central business district of Christchurch out to the sea. So it is becoming a new part of the landscape structure of the city.

Katrina Simon (11:33):
In response to this event, there was a design competition, an international design competition held for a memorial to the event, to the impact that it had on people, not just people who died, but also people whose lives were completely changed. And it was also an opportunity to give recognition and thanks to people from the surrounding communities and other parts of the country and from around the world who gave help and assistance in this time. So I joined a small team of designers and we entered the design competition. I've entered lots of design competitions and I encourage you to do the same. They're fantastic. A really great way to exercise your design thoughts without necessarily having to have a job or a brief. You actually have something to respond to and you can say what do you think would be fantastic.

Katrina Simon (12:23):
In this case we proposed, it was a project called Call and Response, which really spoke about this idea of people needing help and receiving it. And that we tried to give that some spatial configuration of the grove of trees, a series of walls, and also a sound work and a bridge that meant there was a whole sort of ceremonial and performative aspect to the way that the small memorial would operate.

Katrina Simon (12:45):
In the end, we were in the top six, but we didn't win. So another project was actually built and we visited there. If anyone goes. But it was still a great experience to be part of that. And again, it was another way of rethinking these ideas about how memory can and might be embedded within landscapes as they continue to change. So that's the last thing I'd like to leave you with, is a thought about making and thinking. And one of the things that really, I guess, sits behind a lot of what we do in design research is this idea that we actually think through making. That's our way of exploring ideas and generating possibilities.

Katrina Simon (13:24):
So then the question I think becomes, what kinds of making will help us think about what we want to think about? And the more we make, the more thinking we are able to do. So, really I truly encourage you to embrace the possibilities of thinking through making as you are in design studios, make as much as you possibly can, make drawings, make models. You've seen some amazing examples of people doing things in their very small apartments and kitchens with unusual materials, really just to keep those ideas flowing. So I hope you have a wonderful start to your studies and I look forward to getting to know you through those studies in the next few weeks and months and years. Many thanks.

Phillip Bilsk (14:09):
OK, thanks for that, Katrina. So we have here yet another welcome. This time, we sort of welcoming you, I guess, to the sort of a road map of the next sort of two years of the master's program. A master's program is the chance to take control over your own learning, to sort of pursue and develop your own individual interests within landscape architecture. No two students have the same path through the master's here for reasons that I'll get to in a minute. But in charting that path, you're able to sort of pursue learning at a high level to take courses that are asking you not just to learn, but to begin to kind of research and to develop new knowledge at that kind of postgraduate level that you're at now.

Phillip Bilsk (14:55):
So what we're going to do to sort of look at that roadmap over the next sort of two years, and in doing so, we're going to discuss the sort of strengths of the RMIT Landscape Architecture program and also the sort of structure and the content of a lot of the courses that you're taking over the next two years. So this is, maybe, normally quite a boring diagram and it essentially is a study plan or a description of which course you take at which time. But we're going to use it as a map. We're going to use it to see what it tells us about the program and how it works and try to look at the kind of bigger picture of what each of these course names and course numbers represent.

Phillip Bilsk (15:39):
So at the start, we're down over sort of here. So we have both a mid-year entry and an end of year entry. And so we're starting off with this as our first semester, which is actually the second semester of the year. Then we're shifting over to first semester next year, then the second semester next year, and then the final semester, which would be the first semester of 2022. So, we'll start by looking at your studio classes. So you should be enrolled in studio seven for the semester and then you'll proceed to studio eight next semester. So these boxes are essentially double the size of the other boxes that we see at the top and up the bottom here. And that's because the studio courses are 24 credits. They're worth essentially twice the credit points of the other two classes, which means they have twice the amount of teaching and twice the amount of independent study expected.

Phillip Bilsk (16:42):
And that is because we are a design focused program even compared to other landscape architecture programs. And we see design studios as the place where you apply all the other knowledge that you're learning from all the other courses that you're taking. That we learn about things like plants or landforms or digital tools because they ultimately help us design things better. So, your design studios are where you will use those other knowledge from other courses and begin to explore a design and the design process as its own form of knowledge, as its own thing that you can test and develop and sort of get better at and develop different approaches to.

Phillip Bilsk (17:22):
Each of our design studios are project based. So you'll be given a sort of real site and a real brief to explore. And that project will be essentially a semester long where you'll be developing a design over the course of 14 weeks for that site and for that brief. And at the same time as well, you will be very engaged with the realities of what is on the ground with these sites. But our briefs for studio is sort of deliberately structured to be looking at is both down and up in the sense that they're concerned with the immediate nature of the site and the brief that you're working in. But at the same time, they're looking at ways to explore these broader issues, issues about climate change or the growth of cities or how we understand sort of the role of technology within design practice.

Phillip Bilsk (18:13):
So at a master's level, a design studio is a place to work through both these big problems and these smaller problems, the problems that cut across many, if not most or all of the projects you'll do in practice, as well as the problems that are related to the individual landscape you're working in and how those things are connected. So we're looking to sort of design or sort of use design to imagine not just a bit of landscape, but to understand these bigger issues within landscape architecture and within the world. So, what's also different or unique about design studios at RMIT is that they're all balloted and that they're all vertically integrated. So what vertically integrated means is that your studios or your classmates in your studios are not just other people who are starting the Masters this semester. What it means is that your classes are mixed, so you'll be working in studio with students who are one semester ahead of you in the Masters. And you'll also be working with students who are one semester behind you in the final stages of the Bachelor of Landscape Architectural Design.

Phillip Bilsk (19:23):
So essentially, these are classes or tutorials that are mixed between people at different stages of their degrees. What we say when we say that studios are balloted is that a balloted design studio course is made up of a number of different design studios, design studio classes or design studio or tutorials. So on the image are a number of posters from a collection of design studio classes. And this was the studios that ran at the end of 2019. So we had eight different studio classes or eight different studio tutorials that were all being offered as design studio seven and design studio eight. So this is why we have this process of balloting, is so that you can select which class or which tutorial you are interested in.

Phillip Bilsk (20:17):
So again, each of these images are posters that are advertising the particular studio tutorial. So that I would say here's what site this particular studio tutorial is working on. Here's our brief. Here's what we're going to learn. Here's why you'd be interested in learning that thing. And it's up to you, then, to choose or nominate among those options. So that's why we have balloting as essentially is that you're enrolled in the course. But once you're enrolled in the course, you still have a second choice, which is what studio in particular or what studio tutorial you wish to join for the semester.

Phillip Bilsk (20:59):
What this kind of means across the next couple of years is that you have essentially two opportunities through studio to develop areas of interest. So, for example, in this semester, you might do a studio that focuses on ecology or focuses on how we design with water. While next semester you might choose to do a tutorial or a studio that focuses on sort of cities or how we might design new types of urban parks. So through the process of balloting and selecting your studio class, you have the ability to curate your own learning and to demonstrate mastery within a particular area and to learn from a tutor who is an expert in that particular area.

Phillip Bilsk (21:41):
After you finish studio seven and eight, so once you move into the second year of the program, you take on Project A and Project B. So, these boxes are again larger than the studio boxes at this final year. These Project A and B courses, again, are worth more credits. They take up essentially three quarters of your study load for the semester, which is because they are essentially sort of thesis projects or major projects or capstone projects. So they ask a lot more of what you're doing and what you're kind of working towards.

Phillip Bilsk (22:18):
So this final year structure is something, again, that's relatively unique to the RMIT program, that when you're going through project A and B, you're developing an independent design research project. So within a studio, you're given a direction about what sites, what brief you're working with, what kind of techniques or tools you're working with. In this final year you had the chance to determine all of those things yourself and to do so over the course of essentially an entire academic year.

Phillip Bilsk (22:48):
So they're a chance to do in-depth, thorough research and they allow you to essentially sort of test and develop these particular interests of skills that will make you unique as a landscape architect, that this is kind of the sum of your knowledge and you're able to kind of graduate, having demonstrated your own particular interest within landscape architecture. And to take that into practice and to actually begin to develop the specialty that you might pursue before you graduate. And to be able to demonstrate to potential employers what those kind of unique interests are that make you special in their eyes, I guess.

Phillip Bilsk (23:34):
Moving now just to the second of the first row of this diagram, these blue boxes here are the seminar courses. So each semester you do one seminar and you end up doing four in total. So, again, there are sequenced. They go one, two, three, four. You should be enrolled in seminar one this semester. So what seminars ask you to do is to investigate a subject through design. But they do so in a quite different way to studios. The kinds of designs that you do in a seminar are much sort of smaller projects and much more focused on one specific kind of question, whereas in contrast, a studio ask you to explore and integrate many questions at once. So when you're designing for a real site with a real brief, you have many different questions you're trying to resolve holistically through what you're designing.

Phillip Bilsk (24:32):
In contrast, seminars are more free to kind of take a smaller chunk of that broader design process and explore it in depth by kind of isolating it. So, for example, this is work from a seminar that asked students to understand how it is we draw maps as landscape architects and also how we can use maps to understand how these large, big scale changes affect landscapes, things like, say, the effects of mining or the effects of ocean currents. So it's kind of looking at this very broad context to what we end up designing and how by, understanding that broad context, we can design better at a smaller scale.

Phillip Bilsk (25:13):
These seminar courses, like studios, are also balloted and they're also vertically integrated. So, when you're doing seminar one, your classmates might be doing their second or third or fourth seminar. So it's mixed between the entire masters cohort. Within each seminar or by being balloted, what that means is that, like with studios, we have a series of seminars that are on offer each semester and they each have their own sort of individual class with their own individual brief and their own individual kind of learning agenda. So essentially we ballot for studios and for seminars. So you have two different sets of choices about which studio class do I want to do the semester and which seminar class do I want to do this semester? And so seminars in particular, because you do four of them, are a great chance to build up different areas of expertize within the design process.

Phillip Bilsk (26:16):
Moving on, the next course we have is called professional practice, so that's only in the second semester of each year. So you basically have to do that in the second semester if you're planning on sort of finishing in a full semester. So professional practice is where you essentially learn many of the professional skills of landscape architects, particularly those that are related to sort of producing documentation according to professional codes, how to manage and administer professional projects from that kind of perspective of project management and sort of construction law and liability and also how to sort of start and run a landscape architecture sort of company or landscape architectural practice. So it's focused on essentially how design or how the practice of design intersects with essentially the law, with different disciplines and with these kind of governing regulations that both govern what we can construct. But even the kind of softer forms of regulations like drawing standards that also govern the way in which you design in different ways.

Phillip Bilsk (27:22):
What we will then move to next semester is an elective. So, essentially the elective means that you can do any other course at a postgraduate level across RMIT. So RMIT has a tool called the elective finder and that essentially lets you search for electives that are on offer. So you might search for an elective, you might say, be interested in learning GIS and you might find a course called GIS 1368 and you could find that and then enroll into that for the course for that next semester, next year. What you can also do is enroll in the landscape architecture elective. So we offer a number of electives as the landscape architecture program that you can take or you can take an elective across the broader university.

Phillip Bilsk (28:19):
The tricky thing or the crucial thing to note here is that if you're doing the landscape architecture elective, you would be using this ARCH 1363 course code but if you're doing any other elective across the RMIT, it will essentially have a different course code. So this is something to keep in the back of your mind is that there's essentially two different ways to play this. One is doing one of our own electives, in which case you enroll in that and in the other case where you're finding an elective to do, you need to find the actual course code to change your enrollment. Because by default, you might be already enrolled in that one, when you actually want to do whatever this one ends up being.

Phillip Bilsk (29:04):
So almost done. I'm going to try to keep things short while we're doing online video. I realize this is not as exciting as perhaps YouTube or something else. So we'll kind of keep things moving. Just a couple of small notes. It's important to, maybe, double check your enrollments this semester and to check that they essentially look like this. So that if they are not looking like that, maybe get in touch with me, send me an email, I can help you out there as well. But essentially your progress throughout the masters and in order to complete everything in two years, then pretty much every course for each semester needs to happen at that particular time.

Phillip Bilsk (29:48):
So that's why this enrollment structure is worth kind of running through as well. If you do and enroll or essentially are doing a part time load that you have a lot more kind of flexibility there to kind of pick and choose where things might be. But even then, there's a couple of considerations like where exactly you fit in professional practice. Certainly by your second year, you actually have not a lot of space for courses apart from Project A and B.

Phillip Bilsk (30:21):
Okay, so that's enough on the courses. This is a slide with the coordinators of different courses across the program. So some of the ones that I've just been talking about. So for example, Yazid is the coordinator of the studios across the master's program. Bridget is the coordinator of the seminars. A little bit cut off there, down the bottom is Charles, who is the coordinator for Project A and B in the second year. And then Fiona Harrison, who's the coordinator for the electives that you'll take next semester. So you'll get to know these people, hopefully, in person next year, but also through sort of emails and campus announcements and things. So essentially, if you have questions about the seminars or essentially anything specific to your seminars, you can find their emails or send them a message on canvas and things like that.

Phillip Bilsk (31:19):
Whereas I'm sort of more of a point of contact for general things across the Masters, whether that's enrollment changes and things of that nature. So then there's a couple of things worth noting here as well, is a couple of other sort of parallel opportunities that we offer to students as options within their studies. So the first one exchanges, is that if you're interested in going on a semester long exchange overseas in the future, that's something that we offer. We have a few different places where we have established exchanges. If you're interested in doing that, say, in the first semester next year, send me an email and we can sort of see how things go. Generally, each of the things I'll talk about on this page need to be done in the first year of your masters.

Phillip Bilsk (32:13):
So the second thing we do are internships. So we have a number of established internship partners, EMF and Stoss, which are in Spain and Boston respectively. And we also have a number of internship partners within Melbourne, within Australia and within New Zealand. So we have some sort of more local options and some more international options. And so, what happens when you go on an internship is that it's essentially a full time study load. So when you are on an internship placement, you are doing that in place of your normal semester study. So what that means going back is that if you complete an internship, you essentially get credit for a seminar and a studio. So what that means is you might go to Stoss, you might work there for three or four months. That would essentially be your entire semester. And then you would come back and receive credit for a studio and a seminar worth.

Phillip Bilsk (33:14):
So essentially what that means is you can complete an internship without slowing down your progress through the Masters, but also you can complete an internship and actually have it be a full time thing that you are immersed in rather than, say, a one day a week kind of setup.

Phillip Bilsk (33:34):
The other thing we offer is KERB. KERB is a journal of landscape architecture that students at RMIT have produced now for about 25 years running. So it's a internationally renowned journal that has a very long history, very kind of prestigious track record, and it's entirely produced by students. So, in the first semester of next year, they'll put out the call for people to apply to be part of KERB from across the bachelor's and the Masters. And again, like the studio, if you're doing KERB, it would sort of replace your studio and seminar. And so, you'd be able to work on that and get credit for it as kind of your main thing that you're doing that semester.

Phillip Bilsk (34:21):
So obviously, putting together a journal is a lot of work that sort of covers things like the putting out the call for articles, doing editing, understanding and selecting the abstracts, doing the graphic design, managing the print production process. There's a lot of things that go into doing it. But if you're interested in sort of writing and publishing, particularly on the kind of academic side of things, it's a really great opportunity. Yes, so there's just a few more details. What are some of our local internships people expect as well?

Phillip Bilsk (34:57):
There are a few other things we'll run through quickly. We have a student staff consultative committee, which is essentially a forum or discussion group between staff and between students to kind of discuss anything related to the program. We also have a student landscape architecture body. Which is essentially a student organized club for landscape architecture students, and they run a number of events, they've a number of kind of support groups and kind of collective learning events as well. So actually, we'll hear from them in a second. We do a number of public lectures and public workshops as a program as well that are open to essentially anyone across any level of the bachelor's or the master's.

Phillip Bilsk (35:45):
This is where we'd normally introduce some of the student administration team who are in the design hub and available to help you with various queries about enrollments and things. They are now essentially working from home like most other people at RMIT. And so, essentially, when you're using RMIT connect or talking to the AUD help team, they would be talking to you directly, but hopefully you can meet them in person next year as well.

Phillip Bilsk (36:12):
What we will also introduce here is AILA fresh. So for context, AILA is the Australian Institute of Landscape Architects and AILA is the kind of professional body that is responsible for managing and promoting landscape architecture in Australia. So when you become an official landscape architect they're the people who kind of accredit you and who manage that process. They also do advocacy for the importance of landscape architecture. They do a lot of professional development and offer a lot of services to members or people who are landscape architects. And so within AILA is a group called Fresh or AILA Fresh. And so AILA Fresh is a kind of subgroup of AILA and they're designed to support people who are on their way to becoming landscape architects. So that includes students like yourself, recent graduates and so on. So essentially, they're for you. So they host a number of professional kind of events or events that, say, are networking events or social events that mix together recent graduates, current students and experienced practitioners.

Phillip Bilsk (37:24):
So, often this will take the form of going to a local office to see a talk, usually by someone at that office about an exciting project they're working on and then having some sort of drinks offered as well to kind of discuss sort of what you saw and to ask questions about the practice that you're at. They also run a kind of formal mentorship or kind of meeting program. So this is kind of like a structured networking event where you are able to kind of quickly ask questions to a variety of different people by kind of just shuffling around them over the course of an evening, which is a lot of fun. And they also run a sort of official longer term paired mentoring program. So there's peers, students with landscape architects and other practitioners for kind of a more structured chance to have kind of longer conversations about how to sort of pursue landscape architecture, what the world of practice is like and all these different questions.

Phillip Bilsk (38:24):
So this Fresh program ran over March to July, so it's not going to run again until March, July in 2020. But I'm just kind of putting it, again, in the back of your head now. It's something to watch out for when it rolls around again. Cool. So, they have social media pages that you should go check out. It's vfresh_aila on Instagram and you can just search on Facebook so they'll post details of those upcoming events. The second group that I talked about before is the student landscape architecture body. So they're essentially a group or they're kind of the representative group of landscape students. So they are themselves, all landscape architecture students across both the bachelor's and master's. They run a number of different social events and kind of workshops and symposiums. They're actually running a competition right now that ran over the mid semester break in partnership with Vic Trams.

Phillip Bilsk (39:26):
So if you check their social media, which we'll show in a minute, you can see the results of that in a couple of weeks. And so, that social media is at RMIT Slab on Instagram and so on. So I think you can join up online and also follow along with what they're hosting. So they also do, I think, regular kind of drop in Zoom events over the course of last semester. And I'll imagine they'll be doing so in this next semester as well. The Student Staff Consultative Committee, I'll be sending an email round about that in a couple of weeks so we can broach that then. This is normally where someone from the library would talk to you. I think because the library isn't open physically, we can skip through that and say that the library has a number of online research tools, sort of vast and growing number of the catalog is now digitized as e-books. And then there are obviously things like journals and other sources of academic writing that have been digitized for a long time.

Phillip Bilsk (40:34):
So while we can't go to the library this semester, at least not in the next month or so, there is plenty of opportunity to still engage with the library online. They also have a number of sort of assistance programs for essentially how to do various aspects of research that are available as online as well, where they would normally be an in-person service. And it's also worth noting, one of the things the library offers is access to Lynda.com, which is now called LinkedIn learning, but essentially this is a very, very vast collection of online videos that will allow you to kind of upscale in any number of different software programs. So we're not going to be teaching things like AutoCAD in class but if you're interested in skilling up on AutoCAD, Lynda.com has literally, I think, thousands of hours at this point of content about how to learn different software.

Phillip Bilsk (41:37):
And so this is the library services that are available that teach things like research skills and narrow down sort of various journals and databases by subject. Cool. So, what we will end with is essentially the next thing you have to do, and that's to do the balloting process. So I'm going to kind of give you an illustration of what that looks like. So essentially today, what we're going to do or what you'll do after this is you can go to Canvas. So hopefully you have links to Canvas already. If not, it's rmit.instructure.com. I mean, I'm sure you've already seen Canvas or you've got plenty of emails from Canvas already. But essentially when you go there and you log in, you should have a Canvas page for your studio, a Canvas page for your seminar and a Canvas page for your professional practice.

Phillip Bilsk (42:46):
And so there's a Canvas pages for everyone who's enrolled in those courses, studio seven and studio eight, along with seminars one, two, three and four. And so today, a series of videos will be posted onto those canvases which essentially advertise the different tutorial options available for this semester or the different seminars or studios you can select from. Those campuses will also post a link to a web form that you would fill out online and essentially nominate which of those studios you would like to join. And then on Monday, you'll receive an email that tells you essentially which seminar or studio you were allocated to and also what the time and location of those classes are. So, this case, the locations are all going to be on Canvas.

Phillip Bilsk (43:42):
We generally run classes through an online meeting tool that is in Canvas itself. But Monday will confirm which particular seminar you were allocated to and when there are sort of first meeting. So none of the meetings will be on Monday itself. So you don't have to worry about that. But to sort of illustrate this process, essentially the studios or seminars will look a little bit like this. It'll probably look a little bit different. This is the one from last semester. They'll provide a link to a form. That form will take you to a website that looks like this. And then as you move through this form, you'll be able to select your different preferences for seminar. So seminars and studios have limited space. If everyone wanted to do one studio or one seminar, they couldn't. We have standard class sizes that we don't go ahead or go above. So we essentially have a ranked choice of voting or ranked choice of preferences. And then we try and distribute everyone so they get at least their first, second or third preference out of the set.

Phillip Bilsk (44:48):
Cool. And so also on the form or where you came from on Canvas, there'll be these posters and videos that describe what you'll be learning that semester if you're selected for that seminar or for that studio. It's worth noting that this form is not first and first serve, you don't have to do it fast, but you do have to do it before Friday morning. So you have essentially all of Wednesday and all of Thursday to nominate your preferences. And then after that, if you haven't submitted it, we'll kind of just decide things randomly for you. So you can take some time, you can read and view the videos, but just be aware that there is a deadline, and that's essentially midnight Thursday. So do remember to do it otherwise you'll sort of miss out on getting to choose or shape which option you'd like.

Phillip Bilsk (45:47):
All right. So he is unfortunately, we would normally do a tour of the campus. Again, as I mentioned at the start, we will be doing that next semester with any luck. So essentially, when everyone's able to be back in the same place, we'll do kind of a second iteration of orientation that will be in person. And we have to kind of meet each other and to kind of meet the spaces that we're learning in. But, hopefully this video has answered some of your questions, given you an idea of where we're going over the next two years. If you do have any more questions, feel free to send me an email. Let me know. I'm happy to do answer queries over email or do a quick kind of Skype or WeChat as well if that'd be easier. So welcome, again, for the last time. And I hope to see you and your work over the next semester. Bye.