First Encounter

Today was an interesting day. I started off meeting one of Calvin's friends, Wei, who here in London studying medicine. Had my first taste of Indian food here and then he gave me a quick tour of the campus:

UCL

Yeah, finally found out that this building's called the Portico and it's like the landmark of UCL. Kinda like the main walkway in UNSW.

After the meeting with Wei, I was just about to leave (actually, I was having another McFlurry at Macca's hehehe) when Justin called and said that the coordinator in charge of affiliate students in the law faculty was free that arvo if we wanted to have an informal meeting and chat with her.

Waiting for Justin

So I hung around and we met Pamela in her office. She was really nice and reminded me of those English grannies who would bake apple pies and have really cool antique things in her house. Anyway, I digress. We had a good little chat but our formal orientation day is tomorrow so I will probably have more to report then.

After talking to her, I realised that they are so inflexible when it comes to timetables and choosing subjects here. Basically, as soon as you choose your subjects for the very first time, you're stuck with them. You can't swap in and out of different subjects and worse still, you can't choose the times of your lectures and tutes . . . at all. You're given your timetable and that's it. Pamela added "Hopefully, you won't need to go into uni five days a week." I was thinking, "HOPEFULLY?! wft?! I ain't computing an hour and a half each way every day by train to attend a 2-hour lecture per day!!!" Note to self: must not jinx myself . . . Their excuse of not being able to run the same lecture multiple times per day on different days is that they don't have enough funds to get lecturers to teach them. I was wondering, "If UNSW can . . . it can't be that they are funded more than UCL . . ." This means I better have made the right choices when I picked my subjects . . . if they're crap, I'm stuck with it. Worse still, if I get a crap lecturer, I'm stuck with him/her for a year. A year!!

And what's with the personal emails from lecturers?! Got another email today from my tax law lecturer (yeah I know, tax law, must have been slightly delusional when I signed up for that) telling us when our first lecture is.

Ok, had a slight panic attack today - some of you know how pedantic I am about my stationery and books and stuff. I only write on loose A4 lined paper (with the red margins and plastic-reinforced left hand side) and only that paper. I've been into like 3 stationery stores so far and I can't find them!! I can only find stupid notebooks where you tear the pages out. I mentioned this to Wei and when he said he didn't really know what I was talking about, I nearly cried *whimpers* he pulled out a notepad from his bag and said that's it when it comes to paper here in London. NO!!!!! Can someone fed-ex a pack to me?!?!?! I only brought one pack with me thinking I could buy them here. I'm being serious!! I can't not use that paper!!


A good designer must rely on experience, on precise, logic thinking; and on pedantic exactness. No magic will do.
- Niklaus Wirth