New student orientation

So on the 7th I went to a new student orientation, which started off with the fantastic fun of standing in line. We stood in lines based off of our department, so I got to stand with all of the other engineers in our extremely slow moving line. I realized that all of the other lines were moving significantly faster then us, and looking ahead saw that all of the other lines had two check in points (humanities had three!) while the engineering department had one. Not only was our line longer than most of the others, but we were also more compact (being spatially efficient engineers and all that jazz) than all of the others. So we stood around and watched all of the other lines drain out, and they eventually had to try to hurry us along by leading us into the check-in spots that had just run out of people. When I left with my tour group there was still a substantially large line left over.

They took the engineering tour groups into a big room where they told us what engineering was for a while, including an explanation of how we engineering students have the most challenging work load out of all of the faculties, and then we split apart into smaller separate groups so that our tour guides could tell us the challenges we were actually going to be facing as engineering students. They gave us the important days like when reading break is and how much we should be studying each day, and then we moved on to the next portion of the tour (probably the most interestingly odd part coming up here)

So we walk into this big area where there are a bunch of people wearing multicoloured hard-hats, and they tell us we need to sign up for something called "Frosh Week" which is apparently a big week to get the engineering students to get to know each other. Wanting to be social I decided I was going to sign up for this. I kindly asked one of the main leader guys "So what exactly is Frosh week?" to which his response was "An amazing time, you need to sign up for it!" Failing to retrieve answers from him I went and signed up for this Frosh week and was assigned to "The Pink Team" and received several pink items of clothing to show my pink team pride (excuse the terrible lighting in that picture). I think my favorite part about the outfit is the pink hardhat, which is actually a hardhat certified for use in construction (I have no idea what I am going to do with that hardhat). While I was very hopeful about this frosh thing, I then got a good look at the shirt which shows the school mascot with what is most likely beer strapped to his helmet. If the shirt wasn't disconcerting enough several of the older engineers stood up and began a call and response cheer: "Department of Engineering! What is our profession?!" (to which I expected the response to be "build better bridges", or at least something along the lines of "make stuff work") to which the response was "DRINK F*CKING BEER!" After hearing that cheer I promptly decided not to go to Frosh, which shows to have been the right choice based off of the pictures (facebook link) and unfortunate hairstyles that resulted.

The rest of the orientation was rather uneventful, they took us to the library and some other buildings (the never actually showed us our class locations like they promised) and there was a big barbecue at the end. It was a rather fun day, though has made me worry about the quality of these engineering students and what kind of people I am going to be working alongside in the future.