Half Day

There you go. Orientation day. An all-day thing that lasted until, you know, lunch-time.

Of course it was replete with your standard bouts of: disorganisation, lecturer who can’t show up for yet another 30 minutes, library-equivalent staff who have to ask the new students how to run their PowerPoint presentation on a Mac and close the toolbox on top of their slides, awkward ‘Do I clap now?’ moments, people dressed to the nines (or coolly playing it down), free lunch that disappears as fast as it shows, awful mug shot on the student card that has to last four years and the odd task of meeting people you hope you’ll have maybe at least one class with so you don’t have to start the stranger every time.

Overall I was reasonably impressed. The academic staff seem a whole lot more… competent or perhaps professional than those at Deakin. And the front desk ladies have been excessively helpful. I spent the morning with two girls who also knew no-one. Beth and Hailie, both very nice. Not Melbourne, born and bred and not fresh out of school. It is strange knowing what to talk about, it seems if you stick to uni, work and basic family life/living situation and the goings on around you, you can at least last a few hours.

As it turns out the intake for Communication Design is at 160 this year – quite high although it’s still only about 10% of the people that applied. To my surprise the majority aren’t immediate school leavers.

I start officially on Monday and am quite looking forward to it. I have a funny feeling that there are going to be all kinds of little expenses along the way – especially in looking at the ‘materials’ list. And that doesn’t include textbooks.

I might get to try my hand at some illustration. Something I hadn’t thought too much about. Very scary. I’m reconsidering whether I’ll bother trying to get an exemption (that has to happen two weeks in) I don’t so much mind doing the class – but I guess if it relieves me of $890 more dollars of debt it could be beneficial.

I wonder how many trees they got through printing all the different flyers?

I wonder why parents don’t teach their big-kids not to ride bikes across roads when there are cars still coming? Drivers don’t appreciate it.