With the debacle regarding freshmen orientation camps in a certain institution recently — which isn’t new, mind you — we thought that we might share with you some of the other welcoming fiascos that university students generally aren’t spared from:
NUS
It’s all fresh in our minds so there’s no need to go into details, but horrors have consisted of blush-ensuing games like guys doing push-ups on top of girls, intense baptisms of sorts, and eyebrow-raising cheer lyrics. Oh, not to forget the reenactments of incestuous rape scenes so painful to watch that they have got some students screaming “Itai, itai, yamete,” internally.
NTU
While the games at NTU are not as explicit, it doesn’t mean that the orientation camps there are any less torturous — licking whipped cream off your fellow student while blindfolded is still an occasional forfeit for extremely unlucky souls. That is, unless, you happen to be a whipped cream fanatic.
Cheers also often are in dialects, much to the dismay of our jiak kantang folks, and you’ll risk becoming the laughing stock of your peers if you ask for the meaning of those terms and slangs. Or you might just expose yourself to something that you could have never wanted to hear.
Camps used to be very much like Mean Girls up till this year. You had to pay a fee of about $60 to join an orientation camp, and go through a selection process to deem if you were popular or attractive enough to be accepted. Ouch.
SMU
This isn’t confined to just SMU alone, but with it being a city campus and members of public walking in and out, the severity of what we call D.U.M.B (Dancing Unnecessarily and Majorly Bad) is amplified. Sure, there are some really impressive dancers around, but chances are, most of us ordinary folks just aren’t cut out for snazzy dance moves. We just end up looking like we’re a) flailing around, or b) convulsing.
Be a fool or be uncool, it’s one or the other with no in between (I repeat, for us ordinary folks, not you amazing dancers.)
IN GENERAL
No matter which university you’re enrolled in, there are certain unfortunate predicaments that we all have to face — the awkward “Hi, my name is …” introductions, obviously useless match-making sessions #foreveralone, and the agonising sleep-is-for-the-weak movements.
There’s a myriad of uncomfortable situations that we will find ourselves in while in camps and even in life, so while this hoo-ha manifests and people clamour to defend their own sides of the argument, here’s a suggestion for those who are facing the dilemma of joining a camp right now: just join one to try out, and if you find yourself feeling too miserable, fake an illness, leave, and never look back. That way, you won’t seem too “conservative” or “uncool”, and hopefully you would have already made a few friends to tide you through the first day of school. Hooray!
By: Chan Choy Yu
