Orientation
Trip Start
Dec 31, 2008
1
10
40
Trip End
Mar 27, 2009
Sydney,
New South Wales,
Australia
Friday, January 9, 2009
Orientation itself was farly worthless except for meeting people. They spent half an hour showing us how to use the library. I can't even tell you where the Kellogg library is located, so I don't think I'll be needing that info. As one girl in my class put it, "there's this great library here- its called the internet". The rest of the time was just doing housekeeping stuff- getting our email/passwords, etc. set up, and then we had a bbq.
I took several things away from this day. First, school is probably going to be ridiculously easy and I'm not going to have to do a lot here. I'm not sure I'm really going to learn anything of much use (not that that is my goal, anyways). All of my classes are pass/fail and passing is 51%. Additionally, they showed the demographics of the place and let's just say they weren't that impressive. I think most of the people on exchange go to significantly more difficult schools. Also, females make up about 30% of our group, but in the general student body it is only 19%. Secondly, attendance at class is tracked and you must attend at least 80% of classes while here. This kind of sucks, as I am a relatively big class skipper, especially with the pass/fail thing going on here. Thirdly, we aren't going to get the treatment here that we get in the US. I think most of us here are pretty used to being pampered by our schools and recruiters (I went over a month without buying lunch because there is so much free food at school) and i sense they don't have any of that here. Someone told me that they have a $1,500 social budget here for the whole year The whole year! That's barely a good happy hour at Kellogg. I don't really know what our social budget at school looks like, but I'm guessing it is in the hundreds of thousands (Fritz could probably answer this for me). I'd bet we spend $1,500 on pizza and Potbellies alone per week at school. Additionally, my initial suspicions about the AGSM building were correct- this building woudn't qualify as a dog pound in the U.S. There are only two main classrooms, and the one I was in could be compared to a dungeon (for those from Russia High School reading (is anyone reading?), it is literally worse than "the dungeon" classroom we had). There were no windows and the walls were cinder blocks. It was really a shock, I think, to all of the exchange students. Lastly, at orientation they told us about the athletic facilities on campus and I asked what I thought to be a fairly innocuous question, which was whether or not the gym was free for students. That elicited a hearty guffaw from the professor, and everyone kind of looked around at each other. Then, shocked, the prof asked us if they were free for us in the U.S. and everyone nodded and he had this confused look on his face. So the answer was yes, we have to pay to use the gym, which sucks.
I don't mean to be down on the school, however. Despite the building, everyone was incredibly friendly and helpful. I know I'm going to have a great time here and not really have to worry about my classwork (or for that matter, finding a job). Now if I can just find an apartment.....
