Monday, February 25, 2008 @12:12 PM
Just a few more days before uni starts! So not looking forward to second year :(
Good thing I have Mondays off so I won't get the official Monday blues but I'll have lectures starting at 8 two days in a week! What the hell were they thinking?!
Oh wells, no use sitting around and rant right? Let's say my goal for this sem is to attend at least half of the 8am lectures.
Alrighty, for those who don't already know, I've been back in Adelaide for almost a month now cause I was a peer mentor for the International Student's orientation!
Was a great 2 weeks of helping out at the welcome centre where new students flock in and get the essential stuff settled like student ID, username and password for using the computers or just about any kind of information. It wasn't so much of being able to answer their every question but to refer them to the right person to get their answers.
Plus there were heaps of moving and carrying around things like couches (!!!!) coffee tables and mountains of chairs from places like Rumours cafe all the way to the Welcome Centre which is actually at Madley Studios behind the Schultz building mind you!
This is pretty much the best picture I could find of our welcome centre. It's at the part of campus where people don't usually venture to. Heck, I didn't even know the existence of this place prior to this.
Front counter is where we blah on and on and bombard people with informtion :P Nah, you know what people at the front counter do don't you?
Then there's a back desk as well where you sort out the various documents. And when we have free time , we'd just chat to the students hanging around. Some bombard you with all sorts of questions like where to get cheap food, cheap stuff and things on lease and bonds which I sadly do not know much about.
We had campus tours too. Suffice to say, I really do know where's where in campus and the story behind Bonython hall which most find pretty amusing.
Other times when the Welcome centre gets really quiet when the students go off for workshops, we do silly stuff like dressing up the kangaroos, naming them and come up with some kooky stories about adulterous and homo kangaroos.
But we mostly just hang around and chat. It's been great working with this bunch of peer mentors. The ISC did try their best to get a good mix of students from various countries but most of us internationals are Asians except for 1 from Kenya. But that's mostly because most of the international students in this uni are from Asia anyway.
Other days when we have the most students are the free BBQ days. What better way to attract people than free food?
Not much fun cooking 300 sausages at once and reeking like one after that eh?
A lot better with serving I'd say.
And there was this time when we were serving at vegetarian booth and we didn't have enough vegetarian patties to go around so those were strictly for vegetarians only and not people who "preferred to go vegetarian". So we had to triple check with them just to make sure they were vegetarians and not omnitarians. I guess some of them had difficulty grasping what we meant or what vegetarian meant cause when we asked ,
"are you vegetarian?"
*nods and says yes*
"do you eat any meat at all?"
*nods and says yes again*
Geez, all the lenghts they go through just for food. I think the meat sausages weren't very good cause a lot of them were burnt.
All the disgruntled looks we were given just because we asked them to go eat meat made me feel pretty bad. This guy even suggested having our dietary preference printed out on the ID cause we were pretty skeptical when he came over.
Then we had some social events as well where we brought students out to places in Adelaide like Central Market cum Chinatown, the nightspots in the city and also Elizabeth Shopping Centre. Elizabeth is very much like the ghetto or Adelaide . They thought it'll be good to show the students that Elizabeth is pretty much a typical suburb despite its infamy. -_-
Plus there were Aussie movie night and trivia night as well.
I like this particular outing where we had people from all 5 continents in the world sitting round the dinner table. And you realize we're all not that different from each other after all. The only African is not in this picture though.
There he is! Rahim's one of the mentors too. Great guy.
Lunch time at the ISC
Victor Harbour revisited after a year. Weather was pretty cold and it drizzled a little.
The train where we took shelter from. Fish and chips there were pretty good and practically all outlets selling them were packed with our students after we told them to try them out.
Boys will be boys.
Stopped over at the wildlife park again. Still the same after a year.
There wasn't a day where we had all the mentors coming in so this was pretty much most of us on the first day.
I would say it's quite a rewarding experience volunteering for this stint despite having to skip CNY and all the goodies that it stands for. Will definitely try out again next sem if I have the time or next year and will not hestitate to suggest you give it a try too :)
