Pre departure - Still
Now that you have all the paperwork sorted out its time to start giving some thought to what you need to take with you. Again this won’t be an exhaustive list but feel free to leave a comment or send me an email about any suggestions you have.

Pre Departure

So recently we got hit by a massive storm. Considering what happened the last time we had a bit of lightning I think my panicked reaction was completely justified and I don’t think unplugging every single appliance I own was overkill. Thankfully the storm seemed to miss the Village and chose instead to wreak vengeance on the surrounding neighbourhoods, leaving some suburbs without power for up to three days.

So the survivors of the so-called “Great Storm of Perth” were understandably dismayed when another storm warning was issued the next day and it got more and more tense as we approached the afternoon. Obviously Perth weather really likes to mess with people as it was a beautiful day with only a few fluffy clouds floating about in the warm breeze and not a storm in sight. The point I guess I’m trying to make is that A) you can’t trust the weather people and B) you can’t trust the weather, people.

Otherwise Murdoch seems to be going on pretty much as normal. You may have noticed the chalk drawings in the photos below. I have been asked if I have anything to do with them and I can honestly say I have not. From what I have pieced together it is part of a Murdoch initiative called “Campus Encounters” that will presumably give away more information on the 29^th of March as suggested by the date in one of the photos.

Finally I thought I would end this update by talking about an exciting project called 365 postcards. Some of you may remember Kacy Mateljan from the blogging competition last year. Kacy has embarked on a pretty cool new project where she plans to send out one postcard a day for an entire year to anyone that sends her their address. Please head over to her blog and read up on it 365 Postcards

Also on a serious note some stuff has changed with the blog. Please check out this page for some important news.

Recently we’ve been hit by a heat-wave that has made living basically impossible. Normally I’m alright with heat, I mean I don’t like it but I can live with it. Sure without air-conditioning the flats in the village basically become cheap saunas and being inside for too long might bring on permanent brain damage but it’s just heat right? Well unfortunately my flatmates and I were destined to find out just how deadly a heat-wave can be.

Thursday night seemed just like any other night that week. Sure it seemed like the day hadn’t cooled down when evening came but at least at night you aren’t subjected to the piercing intensity of the Australian sun. I had elected to sit out on the balcony and do some reading before turning in for the night so I was feeling quite happy with the world as I drifted off to the land of nod where my dreams rose up to meet me like an old familiar blanket. At about 4 a.m my dreams began to twist into nightmares with resounding cracks and booms that drove me right back to the edge of wakefulness, no mean feat because I have a knack for sleeping through loud noises.
I lay in bed with my eyes barely open and was still nearly blinded by an intense flash of white light that seemed to sear its way across my eyeballs. This was it, I decided, the aliens had finally come and it was time for the real adventure to begin. Of course once I was fully awake I realised my mistake because Aliens would never announce their arrival in such a showy fashion. Rather it was a thunder and lightning storm with better special effects than most Hollywood films. I love watching lightning and thunder so despite the early hour I stared out my window for about half an hour until the storm seemed to die down and the rain began to fall in fat splatters. Naively I thought this would signal the end of the heat-wave so I climbed back into bed and drifted back to sleep.

My first sign that something had gone wrong should have been that my alarm clock didn’t go off in the morning which made me late for class which meant I didn’t have time to check my email in the morning. This series of unfortunate events meant I didn’t fully comprehend the significance of the thunderstorm until much later in the day when I was already worn out from Uni. So when I finally did get home and was sitting down with a cup of tea to check my emails and my bank balance I was confronted with the horrible truth. My internet was gone.

Truth be told this actually isn’t that uncommon in the Murdoch Village. The internet provider they have is slightly less reliable than simply plugging your Ethernet cable into a sand pit and hoping that it will magically give you broadband. So when my browser returned with the error message I’ve come to associate with Star-tech I wasn’t that fussed and simply returned to my book hoping to get some reading done before I could veg out in front of Today Tonight, my bad news show of choice. This was sadly to be part two of the bad news, the TV reception was out. I am pretty good at getting bad news these days after having extensive training throughout my life but this was still enough to make me curl up into a ball and whimper a little bit.

I was still on the floor in the lounge when my flatmate, Ariel, came through and asked me if my internet was working. This was to be a recurring theme throughout the weekend. Thankfully I worked for most of the weekend so I was at least out of the flat even if I did debase myself by using the customer wi-fi to check if I had new mail. My flat on the other hand rapidly began to resemble something out of Lord of the Flies as we are all confirmed internet addicts who really miss their regular hit of bandwidth.

Finally, when it seemed like we were all about to give up on civilisation and begin the inevitable devolution to Cro-Magnons, the lights on our routers began to flicker to life and our email accounts began to show renewed life. Slowly we put out the fires we’d started, unchained the residents we’d planned to sacrifice and life returned back to normal. However I don’t think I’ll ever look at a lightning storm again without recalling how it nearly destroyed the lives of four innocent people whose only crime was relying on technology for everything.

There seems to be a recurring theme for me of being completely unprepared whenever a new semester starts. One week I’ll spend waking up really late and playing video games in my underwear and then all of a sudden week one of University starts and I have to go back to wearing pants. That’s not to say that the date classes start isn’t made very obvious just that it always seems to take me by surprise no matter how many post-it notes and phone reminders I set myself.

Part of the problem is that there is always so much stuff that I need to buy and my brain deactivates in order to protect me from the realisation of just how much money I need to spend. The other part is that by the time semester starts I’ve really adapted to being on holiday and it takes me all semester to break out of the bad habits.

The point is that semester has started and I have been running around buying books, signing up for classes, showing up for classes and completely forgetting that I have a blog to update. This year promises to be quite interesting as I am focusing solely on my journalism minor so I get to take some pretty exciting sounding units such as Literary Journalism and Digital Photography. The down-side is that I know absolutely nothing about those units so I will have to work twice as hard to simply achieve my usual average.

Another feature of this year will hopefully be the appearance of some guest blog posts; I will try and get some other students to share their stories and their impressions of life in Perth and University. I’m hoping that some people will find this useful as they are probably getting a bit sick of reading my usual stuff.
Now I know this has been short but I am afraid I now have some reading to do before my lectures tomorrow.

A whimsical creature, it comes not when summoned but is known to creep up on the unsuspecting. Nobody is completely immune to its soft siren call although some can resist for days on end often with chemical help. It’s also one of the most valuable resources a student has and must be hoarded whenever possible.

When I was in my first year, all those months ago, I got very stressed out about University. I would spend all day in class, go back to the village and eat dinner and then go back up to the library. At about 3 a.m I would walk back from the library, exhausted and not any more confident in myself, only to get up early the next day and repeat the cycle. It was inevitable that the sleep deprivation would catch up with me and on the night before one of my exams it did. I had been studying too hard and getting very little memorised when I just collapsed, luckily I was in my room studying on my bed. The next day I slept through the alarm I had set, waking up feeling very groggy at 9 instead of 7. My exam was at 9:30. Even today I get a little frightened at how I nearly decided to go back to sleep, luckily I glanced at my watch and my brain did a little scream propelling me out of bed and into the shower. I did pretty well in that exam but that’s not really the point, from that day forward I vowed to never let myself get so sleep deprived.

It’s a vow I’ve broken many times, sometimes because of exams, sometimes because of assignments and sometimes because I just didn’t want to go to sleep when I could be hanging out with my friends instead. I think the last one is perhaps one that a lot of people can relate too. I didn’t exactly have a curfew when I lived with my uncle but they had work in the morning so there would come a time when I would be alone in the living room while everyone else was asleep upstairs. When I started at Murdoch I could wander into the living room at 3 a.m and find my flat-mates watching the television or simply talking for hours about nothing. It was amazing for the first few weeks but after I started dozing off in lectures I kind of realised I would have to start being a bit smarter about when I went to bed.

At first I got around the sleep I was losing from late-night studying by simply drinking a lot of coffee. This seemed to work for a week or two but I still did have trouble focusing when I’d pull all nighters on my assignments, until I discovered No Doz. I’m not going to list the numerous problems I had with No Doz, nor do I think it necessary to tell the story about the time it made me shake so much in a lecture that my notes were illegible. I think if you learn anything from this blog let it be that No Doz is not a good idea. Ever.

I guess the point is that sleep is very important to your average student. I would like to believe that I can build up a ‘bank’ of sleep over the holidays and on the weekends but really that’s more of a temporary measure. Sometimes you will just lie in bed and stress out over exams and assignments that you know are going to be there when you wake up but sooner or later you learn to just push it all aside and relax. A lot of people I know find that the early hours of the morning are their most productive; perhaps the removal of other distractions helps their concentration. Personally I find it helps with mine but you might find it just makes you tired.

So at the end of the day you’ve got to decide when you go to bed. Maybe you’ll want to stay up to read that final chapter in your textbook, or have one more beer with a friend but at the end of the day I hope you guys don’t neglect your pillows as I did in my first year. Also I hope you learn the lesson about No Doz without having to find out first hand.

For most International Students the Village is a fairly intimidating place. When I was first making my preparations for departure I had no idea what would await me when I arrived. I had visions of cramped dormitories and guys who didn’t understand personal space in the shower, mainly due to what I had seen in college movies so I think it’s perfectly reasonable to be a little bit apprehensive. In this post I’m going to hopefully set some things straight about what life is like in the Village. It’s entirely possible that some of this stuff might change next year but at least this way you’ll some sort of idea.

First things first: Arrival.

So you’ve taken the taxi/bus/been dropped off by a family member and now you’re standing in a car-park that looks scarily similar to every other car park around. In front of you is a cluster of squat brick buildings that look virtually identical except for the numbers stuck to some of them. To your right, depending on the car park you’ve chosen to arrive in, are three tall white buildings. That’s the new village but we’ll get to that later. For now what you need to do is follow the signs to the Admin building. If you’ve arrived after 11 p.m don’t panic, during check-in periods someone is always on call to help you get sorted out.

Basically during check-in the 3 big things you need to do are; 1) Sign a key contract, 2) Pick up a welcome pack and 3) Pick up a room inventory list.

1) This is basically a contract that makes you responsible for your key. If you lose it you get charged for a new one and the cost of replacing your lock. Try not to lose your key.

2) This one varies every semester. There is always a letter from the Village Director, a map of the Village, a list of the events that will be run over orientation and sometimes a USB key with the Village handbook on it. This stuff doesn’t really seem that vital but it can be useful to have an idea of what there is for you to do when you’re in an unfamiliar place.

3) I reckon this to be the most important item you can get. Essentially when you first move into your room there might be an awful lot of broken stuff. Filling out this form means you won’t get charged for any damage that was already there before you moved in.

When you’ve done all that you’ll have reached the stage known as; Orientation.

I consider this part to be the most important thing you can do in your first few weeks. You should try and get to know your flat-mates, find out what they like and don’t like, compare movie tastes, argue about music or sports and get legless together make every effort to meet as many people as you can. This isn’t the time to worry about your degree, whether or not you’ll do well, whether you need to take a folder or a laptop into lectures and if you should be a financial guild member or not (do it!).

I realise this might be the last thing parents want to read when they come to this blog but honestly these first weeks before University starts are crucial to how you’ll live. People who get on with their flat-mates are less likely to argue or fight with them over trivial issues and they tend to always have someone to watch TV with or share dinner. Your flat-mates are your family while you live in the Student Village. These are the people who will look after you when you’re sick, loan you some cash when that bank transfer has been delayed and be there for you when you get stressed about exams and assignments. Of course they will hopefully be able to rely on you for the same kind of treatment when things go wrong for them.

Finally after the exciting and hopefully fun orientation the boring University stuff starts. But as this post is primarily about the Village I think there are possibly a few misconceptions about what is and isn’t provided upon arrival.

For starters the brochures, at time of writing, advertise that every apartment has a phone. This is not the case as every phone was removed at the beginning of 2009. This is a little bit irritating but not a massive problem if you have Skype or a decent cell phone but it’s still something to be considered by International Students.

Secondly the internet is not free!! If you want to use internet in your room you’ve pretty much got to choose one of the ‘plans’ from the ISP the Village uses; Startech. The cheapest plan is $5 for an hour and the most expensive is $60 for a month. Honestly the internet isn’t so bad, there have been a lot of problems but I’ve had much the same experience with that of the University Internet. Again it’s not a deal breaker but some students are often a little put out by the fact they need to pay for, what some consider is, a basic need.

Finally upon arrival some students decide to purchase the linen pack. I might get into trouble for this, though I doubt it, but I’d advise against that. It’s probably cheaper to simply purchase the stuff individually from K-Mart which is about a 15 minute walk down the road; this goes for the cutlery pack too.

Overall I’d say the Village can be a great place to live. There are some fun events that you can attend, and some less fun ones that you can probably avoid, great people to meet, an easygoing environment to make friends and meet people from other countries, a pretty useful support network from the RA’s (my completely unbiased opinion as an RA there) and access to some handy facilities. If I hadn’t lived in the Village I probably wouldn’t have made as many great friends as I have nor had nearly as many of the exciting experiences. Some day, when I’m not liable to get sued, I’ll tell you guys about the naked Swede incident. But for now I think I will end this post here.