Orientation Day 3

On Day 3 which is yesterday, I woke up earlier at about 7.15 am to get ready to have breakfast with my new friends at 8 am in the dining hall. Campus tour is at 9 am. The academic block may look small from the view above, but after walking around, it's really quite big. Besides the main square academic block, there's another extension of classrooms and library at the learning resource building. After campus tour, we're given an introduction talk on the library and its facilities plus also on the online resources available on the Inti network. Quite impressive really, because they have stuff like thesis, academic journals and also a Law article archive. Like in Singapore schools, assignments and lecture notes were uploaded onto the network.

After lunch, there's a talk on career counselling and it's interesting that the university organises seminars and language classes where attendance will all be compiled onto a record certificate. Again, it's something like the SGC down south. In addition to that, every 5 students will be attached to a mentor lecturer who will write a testimonial on the performance of the student at the university. Hmm..I'm just wondering why NYJC is withholding the form tutor's testimonial from being given out. The final talks were given by the big shots in the university management. Apparently, there's alot of stressing on the consequences of plagiarism which Stan of course is aware of, courtesy of reminders from Cambridge and the infamous Project Work Committee. The bottom line is that if you quote alot, make sure you compile your citation like mad. Citation is the lifeblood of research papers and reminds students that they are not such a smart ass to come out with complicated concepts..lol. The funniest talk is the one on the importance of English. The professor gave so much puns and misuse of the English language that I almost had stomach cramps from laughing! There was also stressing on students to use English in the campus no matter how bad they are. From my interaction with various students in the campus, I would say there's a need to brush up the level of English communication among the student population.

I had more opportunity to interact with more people at the orientation games. We were divided into groups that are different from the first day of orientation. During the ice-breaking game, it's kinda funny that I was at the centre of attention again. Most of the people in the group like to call either me or a guy called Vincent coz we had easy to remember English names. It was so frequent that the facilitator actually wondered whether my name or Vincent got called more often. Building the longest line was interesting because me and some of the boys in the group took out our shirts to form the line. Some fella at another group took off his pants also and this left him with his boxers only. By the time they had the animation game, I was really exhausted. I went to have late night supper with Veida and Michael and returned back to the hostel to check out the internet connection. It seems that every hostel block is filled with wireless internet waves and it's also possible to connect through the fat broadband cable as I've discovered today. The speed is not too bad. Normal surfing is way faster than dial-up but getting youtube video is still slower than streamyx in Taiping. But hey, with free broadband access, I can't complain much..lol =p