UQ Orientation

Soo…since I am a WashU student, I got a chance to go through, not one, but TWO orientations. ::fake smile:: Our first orientation (just 2 days) was lead by Ann Wadsworth (she’s great btw, may have to do another post about her greatness lol), who is our contact for UQ (University of Queensland) and just Brisbane in general. So when we all arrived July 16, we met up with her to get the little things taken care of like ID cards, Go! Cards (for the public transportation), and she took us to K-Mart to get some essentials.

Day 1 of orientation, we had a 2-3hr PPT presentation on everything we needed to know about signing up for classes, traveling during the semester, and everything Australian (e.g. safety, slang, and culture). Afterwards, we went into the city for lunch followed by a bus tour of the city. I’ll admit, I only really paid attention to the one or two places where the bus actually stopped so we could take pictures lol (one of them being ^Mt. Cootha, great view of the city). It was pretty hard to notice and remember any of the other sites the busdriver casually mentioned on the mic while we drove past.

Day 2 of the orientation started with the Lone Pine Koala Sanctuary (courtesy of WU)…pretty much a small zoo with majority of the animals being koalas. They also had kangaroos, crocodiles, Tasmanian devils (which, might I add, look NOTHING like the cartoon character), dingos, owls, parrots, and other birds.

It was pretty cool.

After lunch, we went on a 3hr scavenger hunt around the city…it definitely helped to familiarize ourselves with the area.

*WU group for Scavenger Hunt. Instruction: Crawl across the street

After the WU orientation, there was then the UQ International Student orientation…basically the exact same thing as our 3hr PPT w/ Ann but spread out into individual sessions per subject over a period of a few days. It def. paled in comparison to WU's Orientations. And yes, it was painful.

*PPT= PowerPoint

*def. = definitely