Tertiary Verse, Same As The First?
Feb. 12th, 2008 07:33 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
bliumchikO Week, for those not In The Know, is short for Orientation Week, a sort of hi this is your uni there's the bucket now go meet people event. That week is actually next week, and at UTS it is more accurate to refer to it as "O Day" because it's actually just Wednesday. The rest of the week, however, is devoted to the provision of Helpful LecturesTM such as Academic Language And You - We Give A Fuck About The Oxford Comma and Excel, More Excel, Advanced Excel and Super Saiyan Excel Virtuoso X Treme. This week is split between various sessions of Official Welcomes for all new students, one of which I attended on Monday.
I headed over to the uni with yet another example of facial punctuation (dare I say punktuation?)1. The session was hard to miss what with the flock of Peer Networkers in bright orange T shirts waving at us manically and forming a sort of guard of honour pointing towards the Great Hall. There my soon-to-be fellow students and I were greeted by a bearded eccentric old man in a strange robe who gave us this magical talking hat... by which I mean, we milled around until the orange shirts directed us into orderly rows of chairs and a disembodied voice asked us to rise and welcome the Official Party.
At this point I began to experience a sort of deja vu which was only compounded when said Party strolled regally into the hall, clad in academic robes and caps, and a cheerful third year student came up to the podium to welcome us to the university, pausing to pay respect to the Traditional Owners Of This Land3, and tell us all about all the excellent extracurricular activities that we are invited, nay, encouraged to participate in. Those who just graduated with me will find all this strongly, perhaps even hauntingly familiar. Then there was a speech by the Dean, or the Chancellor or someone - probably not the Arch Chancellor and almost certainly not the Chair of Indefinite Studies. I remember neither his title nor his name, nor indeed his sage advice, for all three were outshone (quite literally) by his tremendous, dare I say luminous forehead. The man's bald spot is encroaching upon the hirsute regions with alarming speed, and doubtless holds a majority in the Scalp Parlaiment. It is likely that his forehead has power of veto over most of his actions - another example of the modern failure of democracy. In any case, his strong resemblance to a brass doorknob was the larger impression I took away from the lecture, so should I encounter him here on in he shall be known as the Knob.
After the Knob's speech, which probably contained some such waffle to the tune of Welcome, Thank You For Coming, Enjoy Your Tertiary Education, we were treated to yet another example of Cultural Sensitivity in the appearance of an Aboriginal dance group, which was actually a bit surreal. I mean, there was this big red-carpeted stage in between a row of stuffy begowned academics and a sea of chairs nominally containing future university students, and we all watched in deathly silence as three men and a woman in loincloths and body paint pretended to be goannas and made whooping noises. Then we applauded politely. Not to disparage either the performance or the response, but put together they were a little incongruous. It was like we were watching an opera or a ballet, when really we should've been gathered around in a circle, preferably outside, clapping and laughing along and perhaps eating something or shushing toddlers - in short, a community thing, appropriate to the setting. Not a Capital P Performance. But that's just my casual opinion. I do have some experience with awkwardness, I'm sure not everyone in the hall felt it, and in any case, a little incongruity can be a good thing on occasion.
Moving on - apparently Cheery and Knobby hadn't covered enough Welcoming ground, so next up after a short break to drink orange juice, turn down tim tams and make friends with fellow Humanities students (recognisable by our orange nametags) were the school counsellors. Hugo and Melissa were tasked with presenting a powerpoint slideshow containing all the information we were about to be given in small neat folders, and also to make us feel At Home. For us this meant another half hour of gradually sliding down our seats to the tune of a stammering Peruvian fellow earnestly talking about Challenging Values.
After all this the combined rumbling of a thousand stomachs prompted a Getting to Know The Peer Network And Each Other lunch. I ended up at Yum Cha, at a remote and isolated table peopled entirely with international students and completely ignored by the nice folk with carts. Lest we resort to cannibalism we eventually decided that in the unlikely event of flagging someone down we would take whatever they had because there might not be more where that came from. I also used entirely too much chilli sauce and as a result ended up drinking ludicrous volumes of green tea while probably making a fool of myself in political discussion with a dude from Lebanon. Oh but mmm, worth it for the noodles and prawn dumplings. Nom nom nom.
Finally we trooped back to the uni (our peer networker showed us a shortcut that goes past the Design Architecture & Building Building, so I know how to visit Beth [Puffin!] later in the semester) and signed up for next weeks lectures. I'm skipping the excel series because it's mostly for business students and my excel power is over nine thousaaaaand for my purposes, and also the several Motivation: How to Have It talks because if there was anything more they could tell me that they hadn't told me in high school, they would certainly have told me in high school, given how much They despaired of me and my Motivational Skills Of A Comatose Pot Plant. There we also received the Small Neat Folders as promised, which reiterated the entire powerpoint presentation minus Hugo's stuttering ancient jokes and anecdotes about monks. Basically, don't plagiarise, do hand in your work on time, do show up to classes even though nobody will check, We're Here For You, and what to do In The event Of.
And that is the end of the tale. Oh, apart from a minor point of fail when I went to catch the lift back down from the computer labs where we did the scheduling. Apparently ground floor is level four, who knew? Y HELO THAR, random warehouse/bunker/parking garage/mysterious underground lair.
1 And I have developed a sort of theory about why I'm doing that, but right now I'm in danger of being booted offline and I want to finish this account before that happens.2
2 "~ !", incidentally.
3 None of whom were specifically present, but had they been they presumably would have felt that this touching gesture made up for the hundreds of years of discrimination, halfhearted genocide and general British busybodying.
I headed over to the uni with yet another example of facial punctuation (dare I say punktuation?)1. The session was hard to miss what with the flock of Peer Networkers in bright orange T shirts waving at us manically and forming a sort of guard of honour pointing towards the Great Hall. There my soon-to-be fellow students and I were greeted by a bearded eccentric old man in a strange robe who gave us this magical talking hat... by which I mean, we milled around until the orange shirts directed us into orderly rows of chairs and a disembodied voice asked us to rise and welcome the Official Party.
At this point I began to experience a sort of deja vu which was only compounded when said Party strolled regally into the hall, clad in academic robes and caps, and a cheerful third year student came up to the podium to welcome us to the university, pausing to pay respect to the Traditional Owners Of This Land3, and tell us all about all the excellent extracurricular activities that we are invited, nay, encouraged to participate in. Those who just graduated with me will find all this strongly, perhaps even hauntingly familiar. Then there was a speech by the Dean, or the Chancellor or someone - probably not the Arch Chancellor and almost certainly not the Chair of Indefinite Studies. I remember neither his title nor his name, nor indeed his sage advice, for all three were outshone (quite literally) by his tremendous, dare I say luminous forehead. The man's bald spot is encroaching upon the hirsute regions with alarming speed, and doubtless holds a majority in the Scalp Parlaiment. It is likely that his forehead has power of veto over most of his actions - another example of the modern failure of democracy. In any case, his strong resemblance to a brass doorknob was the larger impression I took away from the lecture, so should I encounter him here on in he shall be known as the Knob.
After the Knob's speech, which probably contained some such waffle to the tune of Welcome, Thank You For Coming, Enjoy Your Tertiary Education, we were treated to yet another example of Cultural Sensitivity in the appearance of an Aboriginal dance group, which was actually a bit surreal. I mean, there was this big red-carpeted stage in between a row of stuffy begowned academics and a sea of chairs nominally containing future university students, and we all watched in deathly silence as three men and a woman in loincloths and body paint pretended to be goannas and made whooping noises. Then we applauded politely. Not to disparage either the performance or the response, but put together they were a little incongruous. It was like we were watching an opera or a ballet, when really we should've been gathered around in a circle, preferably outside, clapping and laughing along and perhaps eating something or shushing toddlers - in short, a community thing, appropriate to the setting. Not a Capital P Performance. But that's just my casual opinion. I do have some experience with awkwardness, I'm sure not everyone in the hall felt it, and in any case, a little incongruity can be a good thing on occasion.
Moving on - apparently Cheery and Knobby hadn't covered enough Welcoming ground, so next up after a short break to drink orange juice, turn down tim tams and make friends with fellow Humanities students (recognisable by our orange nametags) were the school counsellors. Hugo and Melissa were tasked with presenting a powerpoint slideshow containing all the information we were about to be given in small neat folders, and also to make us feel At Home. For us this meant another half hour of gradually sliding down our seats to the tune of a stammering Peruvian fellow earnestly talking about Challenging Values.
After all this the combined rumbling of a thousand stomachs prompted a Getting to Know The Peer Network And Each Other lunch. I ended up at Yum Cha, at a remote and isolated table peopled entirely with international students and completely ignored by the nice folk with carts. Lest we resort to cannibalism we eventually decided that in the unlikely event of flagging someone down we would take whatever they had because there might not be more where that came from. I also used entirely too much chilli sauce and as a result ended up drinking ludicrous volumes of green tea while probably making a fool of myself in political discussion with a dude from Lebanon. Oh but mmm, worth it for the noodles and prawn dumplings. Nom nom nom.
Finally we trooped back to the uni (our peer networker showed us a shortcut that goes past the Design Architecture & Building Building, so I know how to visit Beth [Puffin!] later in the semester) and signed up for next weeks lectures. I'm skipping the excel series because it's mostly for business students and my excel power is over nine thousaaaaand for my purposes, and also the several Motivation: How to Have It talks because if there was anything more they could tell me that they hadn't told me in high school, they would certainly have told me in high school, given how much They despaired of me and my Motivational Skills Of A Comatose Pot Plant. There we also received the Small Neat Folders as promised, which reiterated the entire powerpoint presentation minus Hugo's stuttering ancient jokes and anecdotes about monks. Basically, don't plagiarise, do hand in your work on time, do show up to classes even though nobody will check, We're Here For You, and what to do In The event Of.
And that is the end of the tale. Oh, apart from a minor point of fail when I went to catch the lift back down from the computer labs where we did the scheduling. Apparently ground floor is level four, who knew? Y HELO THAR, random warehouse/bunker/parking garage/mysterious underground lair.
1 And I have developed a sort of theory about why I'm doing that, but right now I'm in danger of being booted offline and I want to finish this account before that happens.2
2 "~ !", incidentally.
3 None of whom were specifically present, but had they been they presumably would have felt that this touching gesture made up for the hundreds of years of discrimination, halfhearted genocide and general British busybodying.
![[identity profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/openid.png){kind=small}
no subject
Date: 2008-02-12 12:22 pm (UTC)Er, anyway.
ANU expected us to figure out excel, Oxford commas, academic language and the eleventy-one different styles of essay for ourselves, and they expected we could find our own damn motivation and/or buckets.
On the other hand, O Week was an actual week, complete with pub crawl, coffee crawl, weird stuff done for free stuff, a bit of a waffling rant from the Vice Chancellor, and a thing called 'market day' which isn't so much a market as it is the various clubs and societies pretending that the uni is the Street of Small Gods.
Except that sometimes they actually would convert each other. Especially the debating society, which sold drinks for the low, low price of $1, a signature, and your soul. But what's a soul when there's weekly free pizza on offer?
But there was no underground lair, so you probably win.
...I think my point might be that you'll remember O [insert time period] for quite some time, and will feel compelled to compare everyone else's with yours. Especially if it's one where the VC rants at the new students about how the big, mean insurance company won't pay for the new telescopes (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mount_Stromlo_Observatory).
Also: your layout! It's all differenticated!
no subject
Date: 2008-02-13 01:04 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2008-02-13 02:16 am (UTC)The military recruiters were there, despite the efforts of the union to kick them off campus. But everyone was ignoring them anyway.
Also I saw Wil Anderson, Adam Spencer, and Charlie Pickering live - Adam Spencer's on the uni senate and I think there might have been some string pullings involved.
no subject
Date: 2008-02-12 01:03 pm (UTC)I now anticipate my own UTS welcome, and there had better be yum-cha, else I'll cry unfair treatment. You damn humanities students get everything.
Puffin out.
no subject
Date: 2008-02-13 01:05 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2008-02-13 01:11 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2008-02-13 01:13 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2008-02-12 02:56 pm (UTC)Bwah!
no subject
Date: 2008-02-13 01:06 am (UTC)