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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