Life of Thadii.

Heavy Weights
Saturday, January 3, 2009

I always thought that academic advisers would try their best to aid exchange students in getting subjects relevant to their majors. Georgia Tech proved me wrong.

The adviser for STAC (Science, Technology and Communication), the college that I'm attending in Tech, is one bloody fat bitch called Reilly who introduced herself with "I wasn't told that I would be getting visitors". Before continuing, I would like to clarify here that "fat" isn't a sarcastic, malicious insult. It's actually high praise, because a more apt description of Reilly would be "obscenely obese". To give some meter for comparison, she occupies 2 chairs and still has some spillover.

Besides being immensely useless and throwing her weight around, she was incredibly negative about foreign exchange students and our capabilities and priorities for subject registration. Insisting that we were probably unable to fulfil the pre-requisites for many of their courses, and that we were of the lowest priority, she wanted us to approach professors individually for approval.

Just my luck, considering that the academic advisors from other schools like Management, Engineering, and Psychology immediately overwrote the prerequisites without even looking at course descriptions or transcripts for my fellow NTU GIP-mates. I think I might consider doing 3 management courses here and end up doing a biz minor when I return to NTU.

Anyway, today was an awfully long and tiring day where we attended FASET, which stands for "Familiarization and Adaptation to the Surroundings and Environment of Tech". Basically a fancy name for academic orientation. It was dead boring. I hope my lectures won't be that bad.

And if you thought STARS was bad, Oscar (the GATech equivalent) is not much better. I'm starting to believe that university subject registration is all about mad rush, a great deal of refresh-camping, and luck.

The other heavy weight that I had to deal with today was moving into our apartments, i.e. "halls". Apparently, I'm the only one with just ONE luggage. Everybody else has 2x23kg of luggage and lots of hand carry. My moving isn't heavy, but theirs is! It's insane. Some even brought textbooks over in their luggage! I'm rooming with 3 other Singaporean guys. Basically we each have a room in an apartment, where we share 2 toilets, a living room, and a kitchen. Pretty sweet.

This is my room before I unpacked.

And this is after.

Oh, notice that their bed is really high (note the height in relation to the dresser and desk)? No friggin idea why, but thankfully my legs are long enough to get up there easily. Shorter girls will probably find getting up the bed an ordeal. Oh and I've no idea about the weird lighting difference in both pictures...

I really think I underpacked. One of my roomies is already complaining that he has insufficient wardrobe space. Apparently he brought half his home. And I'm not kidding, he even packed army rations into his luggage! Like WTF?!

SAF army rations in America. MINDEF should feel proud. Their rations are going REAL FAR.

Oh and to end off, here's a picture of me and my roomies (the other guys in the picture, clockwise from me, Yongxiang, Qifeng, and Cheeyang), and Si Qi and Jia Ni, the 2 other NTU-GIP girls in the same apartment building as us.

This was taken at Firehouse Subs, a place that's like Subway but better, during dinner. BTW, I'm in Crecine building. Apparently it's awesome due to it's convenient location to diners and the Recreation Center (their version of our SRC).

Tomorrow we head to "Chinatown" in Atlanta for our much needed cooking supplies. Meals here are taking a toll on finances. 7 to 8 bucks for a meal isn't going to leave me much for travelling at the end of the semester.

P.S. I think I'm getting used to the cold climate here. Now, sweaters are only really required at night. Tee-shirt and a hoodie is perfectly OK in the day. And yes, we emit "smoke" with each breath. Whee!

One of the Thadii blogged at 12:33 PM.
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