first week of school

and so ends my first week of school. on a wednesday.

this actually feels kind of surreal. never before have i had a 3-day week with 7 hours of lesson in my university life. never. and somehow i'm having mixed feelings. on one hand i'm feel dem song4 for the large amount of free time i have to do my own stuff (though it was used to settle the module mapping and some other cock-up admin issues) and that i'm super relaxed compared to the freshers (i.e. freshies). yet i'm wondering whether i'll get too used to this calm before the storm because my timetable is going to be dem xiong 3 weeks from now. (imagine a step function in xiong-ness). but heck it. just enjoy the moment while it lasts.

the first week of school was pretty uneventful, though it was certainly eye-opening. it dawned upon me that a world-class institution need not necessarily have world-class teaching facilities. the interior designer who designed the lecture theatres in chemical engineering department must have been a total retard, or thought that aspiring chemical engineers are thinner than calista flockhart.

the basic design of the lecture theatre is pretty compact and economical. each row is essentially a continuous solid wooden desk with a row of folding seats behind it. while in theory it might sound alright, in practice it becomes quite a cock up. similar to men choosing urinal stalls in the gents, when people choose seats in the LT, unless they know the person beside them, they tend to leave an empty seat in between, sort of like a buffer zone.

the art of urinal selection

choose A or B and you're homosexual, choose D, E or F and you're homophobic.

when that happens, there are empty seats scattered in the LT, especially in the middle. and because of the compact design of this seating arrangement, it is impossible for anyone to squeeze past to the empty seat without the whole row standing, and even then it is still quite a hassle because there is so little space. this may not be such a big problem if number of people is less than number of seats. however, this problem is exacerbated by the fact that the chem engine cohort is larger than the seating capacity of the LT, so even if all the seats managed to be occupied (a rare feat, can buy TOTO when that happens naturally), people will still have to sit on the steps. in short, the interior designer of the LT likes to see chem engineers suffer.

apart from that the lessons are pretty standard. there is not much difference between the lectures here and those in NUS, except for the nationalities of the lecturers. here in imperial, the teaching staff are mainly english and european while in NUS they are mainly chinese and indian. the accent sounds different but the content and boring-ness is essentially the same. i still sleep during lectures. so much for being an ambassador for NUS.