Tuesday, February 20, 2007
1st Day
Today was the 1st day of Orientation. As expected, it was very VERY different from our type of orientation at the schools in Singapore. From what I heard, NTU and NUS has a pretty good orientation programme. I guess the way it works is by keeping the same group together for 3 or 4 days such that they people involved know each other fairly well by the end of the programme. Singapore's orientation also constitutes of activities lined up in an orderly fashion, on after the other so 1st years would never need to worry about what they're gonna do next.
Australian Universities... are different. No one can decide which one is better because it's two entirely different cultural networks. Obviously, I prefer the Singapore's orientation system. hence I'm being bias when I say that today was actually pretty boring. Let me explain. The orientation programme consist of a total of 4 days. On the 1st day, people meet in a small host group headed by a later year student and they sit in a circle talking more about themselves. Well, the organization can be said to be either flexible or incompetant cause the heads are suppose to inform you by phone. So, if you don't have a host group like me, then you just have to find some other group to join in. So basically, we talked... but not a lot as expected. The bad thing was, I was 1 of the 2 'foreigners' in that group, the others were Aussie-bred but probably has ancestral roots elsewhere. So after talking, we moved on to the touring of the university, followed by the Dean's Welcome. We were supposed to meet out head after the Dean's Welcome but apparently, he couldn't be found. So... we split up. After all, the rest had their own set of friends to follow. Yep, you guessed it. I was left hanging.
So, I guess Orientation isn't everything. I guess the socializing part probably comes from the Clubs or Societies that you decide to join. The format of the whole orientation was for a small group to attend a small carnival, but then I guess it's new for me.
Everything ended about 230pm for me. Managed to catch this interesting stand-up comedy act. He was pretty good.
Subject briefings Tomorrow.
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