27 February, 2009 in University by Aonghas

Superstart Finish

This afternoon we concluded our two week Superstart Maths course with an afternoon tea held at the Students Resource Centre in the Science Building. I took a few photos with the lecturers who taught me over the last couple of weeks.

Julia Novak and me

Julia was our first lecturer. She took us through algebra and some differentiation. I thought she explained concepts really well and was quite thorough in her delivery.

Me and David Thomson

David taught us trigonometry and integration. He was a very entertaining lecturer and I enjoyed his humour in class.

Me and Addie Pujii

Addie was the last lecturer we met. He taught us some differentiation and also held the Mechanics lesson in the second week. He was really friendly and managed to get through a lot of material during his lectures.

I really enjoyed the maths course, despite the early mornings and my holiday being cut short. I know initially I thought it might be a struggle trying to keep up, but in the end I found that the course helped to get my mind back into a mathematical way of thinking, and hopefully this will set me up with good maths foundations heading into Engineering!

27 February, 2009 in Engineering, University by Aonghas

Engineering Welcome

After our morning lecture with David (our last one, might I add) the engineering students walked across the road to the Fisher & Paykel Appliances Auditorium at the Owen G. Glenn building for the official Engineering welcome for first year students. It was supposed to start at 10am, but luckily we all made it in time. When we arrived at the auditorium, I was shocked to see how many first year engineering students there were! Seriously, there were hundreds packed into the enormous lecture theatre (around 620); it was hard to even spot an empty seat!

I was shocked at the large number of First Year Engineering students

The official welcome got underway as we sat through presentations given by various staff in the Engineering faculty, as well as some different clubs associated with engineering. One of the speakers talked about the dangers of crossing Symonds Street for nearly ten minutes, urging us to cross the road using the underpass. He even showed us maps of where the underpass was and everything. Although there were a few presentations that were quite informal, one of the messages that echoed in my ears for a while was the need for us to concentrate on our studies if we were to be successful in engineering. We were told that we were the top students in New Zealand, that Engineering is for the elite, and it made me wonder how I was going to cope with all the pressure I am likely to have this year.

After all the formal stuff was finished, we were taken across the road to the Engineering buildings to the ‘Circle’ (I think that’s what they call it), where they had a free BBQ lunch ready for us. As you can imagine, feeding over 600 people meant the queues went for ages and we ended up waiting in line for a good 20 minutes before being served a sausage and a vodka jelly shot drink thing. Since I don’t drink alcohol, I just gave my jelly vodka thing to Luke, as I’m sure he would consume it without any hesitation. Over our lunch break I met up with a few people I knew, including Mengyun and Menglu, Josh from the trip to America last year (from Westlake Boys), Julian Lees from Science Camp, Michelle Ye and Zac Preest.

An AUES advisor telling us about the activities for the afternoon

We were spilt into three groups for the afternoon activities after lunch. Luke and I joined the group that was heading over to the Recreation Centre across the road to play indoor soccer. When we arrived at the rec centre, we had to get into groups of around 10 for our indoor soccer games. Knowing barely anyone apart from Luke, Michelle and Zac, I didn’t know who to group up with – though I was trying to look out for any buff guys or sporty Asians who might be useful in an indoor soccer team. We managed to get a group of 10 in the end, fortunately including a couple of buff guys AND some sporty-looking Asians. Since they could only have two teams on the court/field at one time, the other teams went upstairs to play some ‘ice-breaker’ games. The game we played in our group was called “3-6-9″. The rules were quite simple: we stood in a circle and went around counting up from ‘one’. At every number that had any of the digits 3, 6 or 9 in it, the person had to clap. So it would start “one”, “two”, *clap*, “four”, “five”, *clap*, etc… it sounds easy I know, but believe me it gets confusing when the speed picks up and you have to think fast (for example, the number 33 would be a double clap).

My indoor soccer team

Our team was called down to the court to play soccer soon after, and our team was getting hyped (or at least I was anyway). However, when I saw our opposition, I felt a little uneasy. We were up against a whole team of huge Indian/African guys. They looked like they could squish us without even trying! Luke decided to be our goalie, but within the first 30 seconds of the game the big gigantor Indian/African surge powered through and scored. One goal down I thought, it’s still good it’s still good. A couple of minutes later, they scored again! Grr.. they were really asking for it after that second goal. That’s when the tables turned. Those Asian sporty-looking guys in our team unleashed their soccer skills and started creating gaps in the defence. It only took a big lob kick over the top and a couple of chasers to finish it before our team was on the scorebaord! It was like a comeback from the dead. Despite our efforts, the other team managed to score another goal and that was how the game ended. Final score 3-1. It was fun nevertheless though.

We then headed back across the road (using the underpass, tick!) to the engineering building where we had a quiz game led by some guys from Auckland University Engineering Society (AUES). There were multiple rounds of 5-question quizes, and each table had a team name. The table I was sitting at became team “Clueless”, purely because we didn’t know any of the answers for the first 3 questions. Luckily one of the rounds had questions about television shows, an area we were strong in! We didn’t win any prizes, but given a lot of the questions were about drinking and alcohol, I wasn’t expecting to know all the answers!

It was a fun day overall and very well organised. If my first year at Engineering is going to be anywhere as near as fun as today was, I’m sure I’m going to have a great time!

26 February, 2009 in Recreation, University by Aonghas

Happy Birthday Mummy!

HAPPY BIRTHDAY MUMMY! (AND HELEN CLARK)
This morning when I got off the bus in town, I met up with one of the guys on my maths course. Apparently he caught the same bus as me but I didn’t realise he was on it. He told me that he was Shameela’s uncle and that he came from Afghanistan some years ago. We walked to university together before he went his own way (because he was doing another course for the day). Marianely arrived at the lecture theatre just before it started but Luke was still nowhere to be seen. I later found out that his car didn’t want to start this morning so he had to catch a bus into town later. Our morning lecture today was on integration. It was mostly revision stuff for me, but it was still good to refresh my memory. We met up with Luke after the lecture when we went to our tutorial room.

My first time upstairs at the Queen Street McDonald's

I met up with Persis and Lydia for lunch today (Lydia was Head Girl of Henderson High School last year and Persis was Deputy Head Girl). We met at Albert Park before walking down to McDonald’s on Queen Street for lunch. Since I had already finished all my lunch at interval, I decided I would just buy a small combo at McDonald’s. When we arrived, it was pretty full of people and quite a few students in uniforms standing around. I ordered a bacon cheeseburger combo (or something like that) for $5. The upstairs eating area was actually opened for the first time in my life so we went upstairs to sit down (I’m sure I’ve never seen the stairs without the chain across the bottom before!). It was good to catch up with Persis and Lydia after not seeing them for ages – I think the last time I talked to them was at Rangeview last year when we were promoting our high schools to the intermediate students. They are both doing Science degrees at Auckland Uni this year, though they will be specialising in different fields later on.

Persis Samuel and Lydia Rayner

After lunch we had a two hour lecture by Addie Pujii about Mechanics. I didn’t actually know what part of Mechanics he was going to talk about, but neither Marianely or Luke came to the afternoon lecture. Before the lecture started, Julia passed around an evaluation form for everyone to fill out about the course. Although the Mechanics lecture was mainly about deriving the formulae found on the Mechanics formula sheet from last year, Addie did show us a video clip of these guys rapping about vectors. I managed to find the video on Youtube, it’s called The Vector Song. Original title, I know. It was kind of funny in places, but pretty random! Here it is below:

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Tonight we went to Sylvia Park Shopping Centre to pick up a Pharmacy book that Calum bought off Trademe. After we picked the book up, we decided to have a browse around in the different shops. We came across the Sony Style shop that sold all sorts of Sony electronics, but everything was really expensive. I saw a tripod that was $849! For a tripod! I don’t know how many people actually buy stuff there; they might just gawk and ‘wow’ at everything and then walk out, like we did. As we were leaving Sylvia Park, we spotted Ryan Benjamin at a restaurant/cafe place about to have dinner. He waved us over, and we had a quick chat with him. He seems to be enjoying his job at Rosehill College. Apparently the interest in Debating has risen over there, which he’s excited about. Too bad Rutherford is going to win the competition this year…

Although we didn’t have a special celebration for Mum’s birthday today, we’ve got a little secret up our sleeves for this Saturday which she doesn’t know about (or at least we don’t think she knows about it!)

24 February, 2009 in University by Aonghas

Familiar Faces All Around

Today was the official opening to Orientation Week at Auckland Uni (I think?) and they started with a Powhiri and Opening Ceremony in the morning. On the morning bus, I was pleasantly surprised to see Craig get on at Te Atatu Road. Because the bus was already quite full, I was sitting in an aisle seat next to a random guy, so Craig sat across the aisle from me next to some random lady. On the way to town, I got a text from Rose asking if I was coming into uni. Apparently she was with Chen and John Kim at the clocktower. I couldn’t go to watch the powhiri anyway, because I had my maths lecture to go to. Craig and I parted our separate ways when we reached uni and I didn’t see him for the rest of the day.

After our morning lecture, we walked past the ASB Bank spinning wheel again. It was being run by different people so I thought I would try my luck at something better than a high-five. I was feeling lucky right from the moment I touched the wheel to spin it, there was definitely a strong vibe of prize-winning running through my veins. I spun… and won… a can of Gourmet Baked Beans!  I was pretty stoked with that actually, they weren’t just baked beans, they were Gourmet baked beans! It even says on the side “They’re not just beans, they’re a status symbol” and it has one of those pulley-ring things on the top so you can easily open the can. In fact, they look so good that I don’t know if I want to eat them. I’ll probably give them to Calum though, since he can’t really eat much else at the moment.

Lunch time popped up really fast today. It may have been because our morning lecture was an extended one and a half hour session, or perhaps I was just really eager to meet people I knew at lunch time. As soon as we got to the quad, the change from yesterday was immediately obvious. There were so many people everywhere. Uniguides in red t-shirts were taking groups of students on tours and the atmosphere was very lively! Rose sent me a text telling me to go to the quad, and when I first saw Rose coming up the stairs I almost didn’t recognise her! She now has a fringe and her hair looked straighter than I remembered. Chen was also with her, going along with her tour. Luke, Marianely and I decided to tag along with Rose’s tour group up the stairs to the Student Health Centre. A lady there gave a quick speech about health services at uni while she distributed paper bags with more information, a free condom and a tube of toothpaste inside. I’m sure I can put that toothpaste to good use (the condom has an expiry date of October 2010, so go figure…). While we waited inside the Kate Edgar building, quite a few people I knew walked past and stopped to say hello. I bumped into Eugene by the stairs; she was waiting for her friends to arrive. Lydia Rayner and Persis Samuel walked past just after. Other people I met today included Caleb Moses, Nancy Jiang, Cresilda Cross and a girl from Avondale College (her name was Lisa) who recognised me from the Avondale Ball.

My luck changed today with these prizes I won from ASB

Our afternoon lecture was a two-hour session today. We were taught about Echelon form and how to organise a linear equation into a matrix. It was quite interesting, despite the fact I started to feel tired by the end of it. After the lecture I walked down to ASB Bank at the Owen G. Glenn Building with Luke because he wanted to sort out internet banking for his account. After he set it up with one of the guys there, he collected his prize from the spinning wheel from this morning. He could either choose between an ASB Bank drink bottle or an elephant money box. He chose the drink bottle. I asked the ASB guy if there was any other way I could win the elephant money box (because it looked cool) and he said I could get it if I set up KiwiSaver with ASB Bank. He gave me some information about KiwiSaver and said that I could take the elephant too. Score! That pretty much made my day. After that, I walked to Sky City to catch the bus home with Calum.

23 February, 2009 in University by Aonghas

Overdraft with Bank Applications

I didn’t exactly have the best start to my morning today. You know how I nearly missed my bus on Friday? Well this morning the bus didn’t even come! Either that, or I actually missed it this time… I was standing around waiting for 7:45am bus until past 8 o’clock before I started to get a bit worried. I called my dad on my cell phone to tell him that the bus hadn’t arrived yet, so he said he would come and pick me up. Just as we hung up though, lo and behold! The bus comes around the corner.

In the end I didn’t manage to arrive at uni until just after 9am. I sorted out my student allowance forms out at Studylink (thank goodness!) and as I was walking back to uni I saw John and his wife from church. AUT seemed to be having an Introduction Day or something because there were heaps of “fresh-looking” people bunched up in the AUT quad. I noticed a few little tents being put up in the quad at Auckland Uni as I walked past. I was approached by one of the guys who was standing at an Overseas Christian Group table. He told me he was from West Auckland and we talked for a little while. He also gave me a lollipop which was quite nice.

My luck on the spinning wheel won me a high-five!

At lunch time today, Luke, Marianely and I walked around the quad to have a look at all the different clubs and organisations that were set up. We saw that the ASB Bank stall by the recreation centre had a spinning wheel with what looked like prizes on each of the wheel segments. I decided to try my luck at the wheel (you could even win movie tickets!) so I went up to the lady and gave the wheel a good spin. Unfortunately for me, the ticker landed on a picture with two hands slapping. My prize – a free high-five with the ASB lady! How rewarding! The lady told me to go sign up for a bank account to get free transaction fees etc. as part of the tertiary package so we followed her directions to find the ASB caravan behind the General Library. There were two guys sitting at a table with a laptop by the caravan; they didn’t look like they were doing very much. Since Luke already had an ASB Bank account, he switched over to the tertiary account. I filled in an application form however, and signed up for a new account. On the way back to the quad, we were stopped by yet another bank – this time it was BNZ. The lady told us that if we signed up for a BNZ account, we would get a free Student Card! I thought, what the hey, I may as well! So again I sat down and filled in another application form. That’s two new bank accounts in one day! I really hope they don’t start charging me for not using my bank account, or else I’ll probably find myself in a whole lot of debt!

17 February, 2009 in University by Aonghas

Considering the Factors

Today was Day 2 of my Superstart Maths Course. I didn’t have to be at uni until 9am so I caught a slightly later bus than yesterday. As I waited for the bus at the bus stop, David Graham flew past on his bike, but I didn’t get the chance to say hi to him. Even though the bus timetable showed that the bus route started in Glendene/Te Atatu, the bus was nearly full by the time it arrived at my bus stop. I made my way down the aisle like I did yesterday and found an empty seat next to a young-looking teenager. I assumed he was a school kid but he wasn’t wearing any uniform. I didn’t know whether or not I should start a conversation with him, so I just sat there silently. Before long I started to doze off, falling in and out of consciousness. The boy sitting next to me got off the bus near Western Springs so I got the window seat for the rest of the trip.

When I arrived at uni, it was nearly 8:45am. I didn’t see Marianely or Luke so I decided to go into the lecture theatre without them. An Asian girl was already sitting in the front row where we sat yesterday, so I shuffled along the row and sat next to her (I left a seat in between us though!). Marianely showed up just before 9am but she couldn’t sit next to me because by that time there was already a guy sitting on the other side of me. This morning’s lecture was spent finishing off surds before moving on to inequalities. I had completed most of the exercises yesterday during our tutorial session in the afternoon, so nothing was really that new to me. When we finally did get up to finding critical points in inequalities though, we ran out of time!

At interval we sat downstairs in the Engineering building near the cafe. My mum prepared some crackers and biscuits for me, as well as a banana. I spent the rest of the tutorial time in the morning working on factoring polynomials (is it “factoring” or “factorising”? I’m sure at high school the book used to say “factorise”, but the coursebook we have says “factoring”… weird :S). At lunch time we met Chen at the quad; he went shopping this morning for denim clothes for his Medicine Camp (I think he’s in the denim team or something). A couple of Chen’s friends came by while we were talking as well. We also got stickers on our uni ID cards so that we get student discounts on public buses. That was pretty much the highlight of my day. I caught the same bus home as yesterday, even with the same bus driver!

Tonight I stopped by Craig’s house before I went to buy some bread and ice cream at Foodtown. I met up with Andy Sani at Foodtown, who recently got back from a holiday. He said he is doing an acting course at Unitec this year, and that he might feature in some TV commercials. I can’t wait to see him on TV so I can say “hey, I know that guy!”. As I was about to back out of my carpark at Foodtown, I got a little bit of a shock when I checked my rear-vision mirror to see Chelsea staring straight at me!  She had just finished at the Year 9 Parent Evening at school. We couldn’t talk long though because her dad was loading the boot with groceries.

I still have to sort out music for Youth Group this Friday because I’m leading worship with Hamish!

16 February, 2009 in University by Aonghas

Starting Superstart

HAPPY BIRTHDAY AMANDA TANG!
I was looking forward to having the whole month of February off before starting uni in March, but sadly my extended summer break was cut short today. I enrolled in a 10-day course called Superstart Initiative in Mathematics, which started today. The course is designed for students who either achieved low results in Calculus or have been away from Maths for a long period of time. Since I did Level 3 Calculus in Year 12, I was a bit nervous getting straight back into maths for Engineering, so I thought this course might help me out. The letter I got with my application told me to arrive at uni between 8:30 and 8:50am. Since I was catching the bus into town, I had to wake up extra early (like 6:45am!) to get ready. It was the earliest I have woken up for a very long time! Dad dropped me off at the bus stop up the road and I caught the bus using Calum’s bus card. When the bus arrived, it was already quite full and there were no empty rows of seats so I had to choose who to sit next to. As I walked further up the aisle, I realised I was running out of options so I quickly picked an empty seat next to a Samoan lady who was listening to music on her MP3 player.

The bus reached the city nearly 20 minutes earlier than scheduled. While I was walking towards uni through Albert Park, I realised that this was pretty much the beginning of my university life. Catching the bus at the crack of dawn and walking through Albert Park is probably going to become very familiar to me. I sat outside the Science building when I arrived at around 8am and decided to have a quick read through my course materials. I saw the signs for the course posted on the door but I didn’t see anyone else waiting so I assumed I was quite early. At 8:30am I thought I might actually check where the lecture theatre was so I followed the arrowed signs that led me upstairs and to my amazement the corridor was packed with people standing around! I approached the registration desk and collected my timetable for the two week course. I couldn’t actually make out anyone’s face because they were standing all the way down the corridor and I didn’t want to look as though I was staring at any one person for too long. While I waited with everyone else by the elevator door, someone started walking towards me. I was pleasantly surprised to meet Luke Dickinson! A few minutes later Marianely Ngangom arrived with her dad as well. I was so glad that I found them two because I didn’t recognise anyone else!

Luke, Marianely and I sat together near the front of the lecture theatre and we were welcomed by Julie, our lecturer for the first few days. The lecture theatre had a dual-projector display set up so she used one screen to show a PDF version of our coursebook (the current page we were working on) and she used the other screen to show the document viewer (the page she was writing on). There were probably 80-100 people in the lecture theatre. For the first hour of the course we started going through the first chapter of the coursebook, Basic Algebra. Most of the content was fairly straightforward, and I understood everything she explained.

At 10am, Julie led all of us across the road to the Engineering buildings. There we had out work session rooms, where tutors were available to help us while we worked through some questions in the book. Paul was the tutor in our tutorial room. We continued to work through our coursebook after a 15 minute interval at 11am. At lunchtime we walked back across the road and bumped into Nancy Jiang and Shirley Kim. They were there to sort out their uni applications and student allowances. Marianely had a little chat with Nancy for a while, and by the time they had finished talking it was time to go back to the lecture theatre for our afternoon session. The afternoon was more or less similar to the morning lecture, but we started to move on to surds and exponents. I caught the bus home with Luke afterwards from Sky City.

Day one down and I’m feeling okay about this course. It isn’t as scary as I first thought it would be, and I’m managing to stay ahead of the class (well, for now anyway). Tomorrow we have a 9 o’clock start so I should probably get some rest.