Australia's Big Names: the Group of Eight

Hey -- Jasmine here, starting this post with an opinion and an almost proven fact:

In this world, there are two groups of people...
1) those who have heard of the Group of Eight and give congratulatory squeals when someone they know secures a place in the university ;

2) those who have never heard of it, and when the name is brought up asks skeptically,"Do you mean the G8 Summit?"

Well, today is the day I will convert more people from the second group to the first group.


So..what is the Group of Eight, really?

Simply summarized, the Go8 is basically Australia's top eight best universities.
Think of Oxbridge in the UK or Ivy Leagues in the US -- what these universities are to their respective countries is what the big eight is to Australia and any students applying there. Students look upon these universities with the same starry-eyed wonder, the same intake of breath, and seal the envelopes containing filled admission forms with the same hope for acceptance and the same fear of being rejected from among a pool of countless other hopefuls.

These universities are research-intensive, one in particular having made inroads in areas of cutting-edge research and appearing in almost every research paper (No, I didn't know that either) and Reader's Digest (as an avid fan of Reader's Digest, that I knew.)

Let's take a look at what universities make up the Group of Eight:

• University of Melbourne
• University of Sydney
• University of Adelaide
• Australian National University
• University of New South Wales
• Monash University
• University of Queensland
• University of Western Australia

The Group of Eight

So those are the Big Eight! UNSW, UQ, UoA, UniMelb, ANU, USyd, Monash and UWA -- whether through abbreviation or their real names you can be sure to have heard of some of them.

Why have not many people heard of this term, this Go8?

Well, I would say that unlike the UK or US coalition of super universities, the coalition formed by Australia's best is fairly new. In 1999, actually. That was just a little over 20 years ago.

Now, for some interesting facts...

• There is a University of Queensland.. and then there is a university IN Queensland. The other one is University of Central Queensland (UCQ) and while this one is a delight for the fact that it has kangaroos living on the grounds, there is not much information to be found save the university site itself.
• All the universities are put in cosmopolitan areas. Considering the eight universities all land within the world's top 100 and so are applied to by innumerable students each intake, this isn't truly a surprise. No Tasmania here, folks!!

• The only university between the eight to offer the course that Jing and I are doing is the UQ -- Queensland. That is one of our two choices, one of the two places currently that we can head off to.What course? OHSE. What's that?
• Australia's syllabus is very research-intensive, with even undergraduates required to undergo some form of research in order to earn that scroll and mortarboard. Heck, we have to undergo research in AUSMAT / SAM, termed "issue analysis."

So hopefully, that would at least enlighten any clueless readers the next time any other Australian-bound students (coughcough US) mention Go8 or you yourself want to know more about it.

I could write more about it...once I get there that is. Once the three of us get there.

In one and a half years, hopefully! :D