King  Gary 

UPDATE: The photos are up now!
- new photos, starting here

Today I went to the UWaterloo for the Student Life 101 event. One of the major reasons was to finally meet my roommates - Geoff, Josh, and Kyle - that will be living with me starting in September. I’ll also be meeting Michael, who is living off-campus because he’s self-employed. I only talked to them online before today, and so I finally get to talk face-to-face. UW was also hosting some seminars to help guide students on their educational journey, such as giving you more information on the elective courses that we can take, help on co-op if you have any questions on that, and we could also check out your residence, the place that most of us will be living for at least 4 months starting in September (excluding Michael, for instance, since he lives off-campus).

Upon arriving at UW today, I get the impression, as I always do when I get to UW, that they are very organized, especially when you compare them to other (educational) institutions. They have clearly marked signs to guide you along their somewhat complex paths (for some people). The first thing that I went to when I arrived there was the presentation for computer science students. So far, all of the presenters have been very energetic, probably due to the fact that they are quite young (mid-30s?), which is welcome news. They often heavily stress the importance of hard work, but they are also strong supporters of the age-old mantra, “work hard, play hard”; the presenter even drew up a pie chart, including such mundane chores as laundry to be ‘Fun’! (I’ll link to the presentation when they upload it to the website.)

I also managed to bump into at least 5 different people from my high school while I was there, or people I knew elsewhere (Donna, Geoffrey, Phong, Quentin, Thomas, etc…), and some I saw more than once - which is great, knowing that you can easily bump into some friends on your way around the campus!

UW setup an online forum for first-year students to communicate with each other and ask questions, and we also used it to form a meet-up., setting the time and place to meet when we were at UW today. I would say about 20-30 people showed up, which is much more than I thought would be there, so I’m happy with that. The forum has had a lot of drama take place on it over the past few months, what with people getting banned for some things, too, and so I suppose that helps the forum users get to know each other better, for better or for worse. Josh also took some photos of our get-together, and hopefully I’ll have them up and available here shortly.

UPDATE: We ate at a Mongolian grill, by the way.

Smile!

The grill and the… grillers?

Popularity: 15% [?]