Warning: May contain rocks

'This is a feldspar-rich glaucophane schist'. Huhh?? 'As you know, the mineral content of a basaltic rock includes....' Ehhhh?? I don't know, or at least I didn't know.

Geology. One of the most strenuous units I have taken at Macquarie. Not only did it expect 20 pages for 5% of the final mark, but it was another reason for my flatmates to take the mickey. 'What do you study Rose? Oh yeah, rocks. Boring and weird. People who study rocks must be odd. Rose what kind of rock is this? Don't answer that, I don't actually care.' Haaaa. Whatevs. I have my own rock buddies.

My first geos friend was fellow sufferer Luke. I think we were the only ones in the room who had no clue what our lecturers were talking about ... particularly Dick, a lovely wise old man who was obviously extremely clever but came out with the strangest jokes that you laughed at even if you didn't hear them.  It felt good knowing that someone else was just as clueless as I was. A normal practical would be something like:

Nathan (lecturer): 'So draw a dot on the stereonet at 30 degrees .......turn to the north point ......'
Me: 'What did he say? I don't understand'
Luke: 'Neither do I, let's wait until they put the answers up'

We did try, honest. Its just sooo hard. It got better when we found other geos friends. More experienced students whose major was actually in Geology. Cameron who would pretend that he knew what he was doing (with his 'geowinning and bad boys) and Elise who actually did know what she was doing (with her scarily detail-noticing eyesight 'did you see that 1mm long spider back there?' Err, noo). During our never-ending assignments we would spend hours in the labs staring down microscopes trying to discern one mineral grain from another. I don't know why or how it happened, but geology become one of my favourite subjects, even if I had very little pre-knowledge and at the time it seemed like the hardest thing on Earth.

The Geos trip to Hill End was..interesting. The best bit was sleeping in an 1800's train cabin stationed permanently in a garden. The days were crammed with taking 'strike & dip' measurements and following quartz veins ready to produce our geologic maps and histories. Urghhh. But yeah, it was kind of fun too...I bonded with new people and got sunburnt! Yess!

It was on this trip that I met Denise with her amazing Irish-Australian accent and Loretta, a girl so clever, inspirational, soo interested in her uni work and forever moving countries..I think she's in Iceland now? I was so happy that my group members had the patience to explain things to me and were willing to help me whenever I was lost (Lianna, Ben, Tony in particular). I don't know how I passed that assignment, but I know that if it wasn't for them I would certainly not have. Oh, and we got to smash up rocks with hammers. Great for anger management. I WANT A ROCK HAMMER!!

Okay, I'm a freak, but in my opinion the best part of the whole course was cutting a rock into quarters. We used a rock grinder/saw thing to chop up chunks of rock. Afterwards we had to polish it, thin it down and identify the minerals, but forget that. I WANT A ROCK SAW!