It’s funny that I should have something to post about the NUS Rag and Flag this year, because I was not actually involved in any way. But something prompted me to write about it. Behind all the glamourous front of Rag and Flag, there is something about student behaviour that comes to light. No, it is not something dark and sinister. It’s their recklessness, indifference, and lack of civic-mindedness that I feel is unbecoming of undergraduates.

Rag and Flag is a significant event in the undergraduate calendar, and it certainly is the culmination of all their orientation activities. Sometimes you’d think it is okay to let down your hair a little, let them have some fun. But there is always the tricky thing of finding the right balance.

Take for example the noise levels. If you are going to be engaged in noisy activities, take it outdoors, particularly if it is going to go on for an extended period of time. However, for the want of free air-conditioning I suppose, some orientation groups conduct their activities inside the common areas of enclosed spaces, where many other people are working. Not just staff members who need to work, but also other research students whose calendars work differently from typical undergraduates.

The repeated reminders to lower their noise levels fell on deaf ears. I was telling my colleagues, how do you expect to contain their excitement. The nature of the activities is such that the noise is unavoidable. What is basically wanted is for the students to get out of the building.

How about safety? I saw how a fire exit door was being obstructed by tons of float building paraphernalia. This was a group trying to seek shelter from scorching sun. Sure, find a shade somewhere to work, that’s perfectly alright. But have they thought about the repercussions of blocking a fire exit door? That it is also against the law? Oh, and if they didn’t know it, surely after repeated reminders by staff members, they should surely have understood? But no, again everything just fell on deaf ears. I saw another case where a fire engine access road was obstructed (although in this instance I don’t know if they had been granted special permission to obstruct the fire engine access for their activities…).

I have not yet seen the aftermath of this year’s Rag and Flag. But in previous years, the rubbish has always been a problem. One day, it is float building paraphernalia. The next day, it is rubbish for someone else to clear.

There was one incident that I want to share. I was involved in an A&A project (i.e. renovations in layman terms). The contractor had a large dumpster to dispose of renovation debris. Really convenient, it was filled up with float building junk right after Rag day was done. The students probably cannot be bothered about it, but it does cost money to dispose of junk. The contractor complained. I tried to mediate and talked to the students in-charge of the group that built their float nearby. They denied responsibility. Okay, we weren’t about to start pulling out video surveillance and carry out forensics on rubbish. But we did have to work out some settlement with the contractor.

All these seem to reflect the mentality of a child who just wants to have the “fun” part, and expect someone else to deal with the “not fun” part. I expect this is not representative of the undergraduates in general, otherwise we would really be in trouble.

Enrolling into a university is a step toward adulthood. It is at this point that we expect undergraduates to start acting as responsible adults. Perhaps you could say orientation is too early a start. But I think there are certain things like fire safety that should never be compromised.

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This week is what’s known in NUS as Week 0. It’s freshmen orientation week. The week where everyone (students, that is) are still having fun. The campus, surprisingly, is not as crowded as I had anticipated it to be. We were able to find seats during lunch, even during the peak lunch hour. But there was one place that was unusually crowded, and that was one place that I had to visit.

It’s the University Health Centre. It was really crowded. There was a super long queue to get to the registration counter to get a queue number. You would have thought that the crowd might have something to do with medical check-ups for new students. But now, there was a separate queue for “pre-admission medical check-up”, and there were no one in it. I re-read the sign a few times to make sure I did not misunderstand where I was supposed to queue. Nope, I made no mistake. The super long queue was for seeing the doctor. Sigh.

It took me all of 25 minutes just to get a queue number. Such a terribly long wait. Even the queues at polyclinics seem to move faster. I don’t know why so many people were at the health centre.

Yet, places like the canteen, bus stops, etc were hardly any different from the holidays. Oh, there were many more students around, of course, but they’re mostly seen occupied with float building or other orientation activities.

A funny thing that they are doing at the bus stops: People holding up placards informing bus passengers to board from the front and alight from the rear. They seem to have been engaged by the internal shuttle bus service operators. I think they were trying to correct a behavioural problem in NUS where passengers alight from both the front and rear, and also board from both the front and the rear.

Perhaps NUS should just consider using trams or trolleys, where the vehicle has no walls. Anyone can hop on or hop off anywhere along the whole length of the vehicle. It would make getting on and getting off so much easier.

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Today is the start of Week 0 of the new academic year at NUS. Week 0 means that it is still orientation, school has not yet started. Surprisingly, campus was not overflowing with people. In fact, I didn’t even find the canteen unusually crowded. If not for the FOW talk at which I had to say a few things for a few minutes, I might not even have realized that today was any different from last week.

The best thing about term time for me is that there is now the Internal Shuttle Bus service ‘D’, which means I can zip across campus in record time. The same trip that usually takes from 20 mins to 30 mins is now like 10 mins to 15 mins tops. Of course, the students would probably prefer holiday time to term time. But at any rate, the FOW (which is Freshmen Orientation Week, by the way) is a Week Of Fun (WOF, or FOW spelt backwards).

I’m surprised that the LT for the talk was filled to capacity. Either students nowadays are very on about FOW activities, or perhaps the LT was just too small. Or maybe there were too many non-freshmen present in the LT. Good to find so many eager listeners.

I tried to sell our intent to recruit student helpers for our network team today, and I was pleasantly surprised to receive quite a number of indications of interests. At least, it was more than I had expected. That’s good.

The reason why I had not been particularly hopeful was that many things I find interesting and worthwhile to do, turns out that our students aren’t all too keen or excited about. There are other things that they are concerned about. Like which bash to go to. Or, heaven forbid, which tutorial class to bid for.

Anyway, good to see the interest. But I’m usually quite pessimistic with these sort of things. We’ll just see how things pan out.

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