My O-Week (Chris)

NOTE: This is a little late, apologies. But still highly applicable!

O-Week is a great opportunity to experience at University what you’ll be doing when not studying and attending lectures and tutorials. For any Arts students like me, who only go to classes for about 12 hours a week, extracurricular fun is going to compromise a lot of your University time. At least that’s what all the clubs and societies I joined would suggest. Free Beer, More Beer, Chocolate Lovers, Friends of Unnatural Llamas, Labor, Liberal, Arts Societies, Arts Collectives… there were such a diverse range of clubs that I practically wanted to join them all. This is possibly because they offered very lucrative benefits to new members eg. A free BBQ or trendy T-Shirt (students don’t have much money for food or fashionable clothing). I think that with the clubs I finally did decide to join, I might become involved in their activities and perhaps even land a bureaucratic leadership role!

Mind you, O-Week isn’t just about joining clubs and societies; only the last two days were allocated to such activities. The first day, Monday, was a great introduction to the University and some of its staff and services through the transition O-Day for students from interstate or overseas. There was lots of free food (buzz words!), new friends to talk to and meet and a quiz, which our group of highly intelligent Arts students won! The prize was a $20 voucher each for the University Bookstore, which, as any diligent pupil would do, was spent on subject textbooks. Important thing to remember kids – regardless of what University you go to and your particular course, you’re going to need to buy textbooks and they don’t come cheap. Unless you have the motivation to go around to the second hand stores and buy them from there. Even then, second hand book sellers know how to get blood from a stone: despite poverty and reckless spending of disposable income, students need their texts. Thus, they mark up prices for University texts considerably (DISCLAIMER: this may be little more than student folklore, and in no way intends to defame and / or hurt the reputation of second hand bookstores and / or their employees and / or their immediate families.)

Anyway, Monday wasn’t open to everyone, thereby leaving Tuesday as the official start of O-Week. Because my lazy Student Host hadn’t bothered to contact me, one of my roommates and I attached ourselves to a different group of Arts students to tour the campus and spend part of the day. Our surrogate hosts were awesome and there were some very cool, interesting people in the group. I already started to feel more at home with the notion of spending at least the next three years of my life on the campus. However, during these tours, we were constantly bombarded by a highly dangerous, aggressive group of student militia who persisted to ambush us whenever we stopped to look at a particular building. They call themselves the “Socialist Alliance” and they are armed with two of the most deadly tools of any student group: self-righteous politics and tenaciousness. Whenever our adopted hosts opened their mouths to talk to us, they would be drowned out by cries of “social inequality!” and “troops out of Iraq!”. Whilst this blog is politically unaligned, there could surely have been a more appropriate time and place to spread your ideas comrades. Tuesday was also the great Student Services carnival with lots more free food, giveaways and information handed out by the Student Union.

Wednesday was an academic day, consisting of sessions giving information on how to study and take notes at University (unsurprisingly, not all that different than high school – perhaps my stance on this might change in a few weeks?) and write effective essays. There were also faculty welcomes, and my own at the School of Creative Arts (which, ironically, is housed in arguably the most plainly designed building on campus) was an informative experience finished by a sushi lunch. I met some more people, signed up for the remainder of my tutorials, and learnt of another stack of books I needed to purchase.

It’s been a riveting week, and after a busy but memorable weekend, I am looking forward to classes starting tomorrow. Slight feelings of homesickness aside and lack of any real employment, I think I am starting to sink roots into the city of Melbourne.

Chris