Orientation week at UTS – who wants some (dis)orientation?

Alright girls & guys, we just finished the much touted Orientation Week programme at the University of Technology in Sydney. Let me tell you, it wasn’t that different from what you’d expect. So, I’ll give you a short overview of the programme.

First of all, there was the official welcome, held by the Dean and some other honchos, who appeared in their “Full Academic Dress”. Which basically consisted of long robes and fancy neckwear, which made all of them look like they just fell out of the latest Curse of the Caribbean movie, i.e. Victorian Age colonialists. That impression was reinforced when they had an Aboriginal Dance Group (ADG) do a little dance in front of them. It really looked like the benevolent conquerors allowed the stupid aborigines to dance around a little in front of them. They called it showing respect, to each their own I guess. After that we had our welcome speech by Doctor Hugo Gonzales, who told us to call him “Dr. G.” or “Speedy Gonzales”. Let me tell you, he’s neither speedy nor a G. His accent does make him sound like a close friend of Cypress Hill though and his slides were funny. His useless advice about starting a new chapter of our lives wasn’t though.

Then we were allowed to book into the orientation sessions for the week. Which we didn’t, as there wasn’t anything we thought we needed to successfully study at University. I mean, the options were: Study Success (6 lectures), consisting of stuff like note taking, time management and critical writing. All the Germans knew how to take notes, so we skipped that. The other available option was IT Services lectures. Those were about Excel, more Excel, advanced Excel, Word, Powerpoint, file management and Unix, nothing we don’t know or really need anyways.

We had another session of Essential International Advice after that, where Dr. G. performed admirably again, by boring us almost to death. The student services team was very refreshing after that. Especially because they did a quiz with us about Australia. None of us won, because who knows who last year’s Australian Idol was…I can’t even remember the german one.

Another interesting part came on wednesday with our official faculty welcome. Since we’re all enrolled in the business faculty (at least we think so), we expected it to be a boring presentation again. But the staff, lecturers and administrative surprised us with a lively performance that only took about 40 minutes. And I even got a 50$ book voucher for the university book store out of it. How, you might ask? Well the moderator basically checked to see if his audience was listening to the presentations by having 3 “Prize Time” slides, where he’d ask a question about the latest part of the presentation. I correctly answered the question “When are library tours running” with “All year long” So there you have it, 50 Dollars for 3 words.

The really important part started at 5.30 PM on Monday, continued at 5.30 on wednesday and ended on Saturday morning at 4 o’clock with the beginning of the first official welcome party for exchange students. Met lots of people, next entry is going to be about that, or about e-requests, haven’t decided yet.