1st few lectures

Everything is pretty new to me.

Getting lost on my way searching for lecture rooms, meeting lecturers coming from different parts of the world, being in a fully diversed class up to a size of 400+ people and some sitting on the walkway, having a hard time trying to keep myself awake for the 2-hour lecture.....

This is something funny that the Professor posted within his lecture slides~~I dunno whether you guys can read it....

It was fun I would say. At least I'm not the one sitting on the floor. Haha.

I will be comparing what I have over here to what I had in HKUST.

One of the lecture theatres

Well I'll talk about the good things here. 

Lecturers and instructors generally speak good English. Those I had in Psychology and Sociology classes are pretty humorous. They conduct very enjoyable lectures.

I prefer how they have 2 hours lecture and 1 hour tutorial here. As I believe that tutorials are definitely important in the learning process (ya, I'm a tutorial person...haha). But perhaps, the 2 hour lecture should be split into 2 sessions, cause I have extremely bad and short attention span. Owh ya, the part that I like MOST! It's absolute grading!!  They have your marks printed on your transcript, so everything is very transparent~

And the bad things?

Hmm. I would say that they have way too many people in a lecture. Some of mine fits more than 400 people, and the whole course actually gets 2000+ students enrolled!! Amazing figure. Other than that, lecturers here prepare notes in a pre-set 3 slide or 6 slide pdf files, which I don't like as I'm unable to customize it for printing to save printing cost as well as paper. One other thing that I noticed here is that, quite a number of my lecturer are not PHD holders! (Hmm, how could that be....) And another issue that I notice might be there are 6 teaching staff (means you'll have 6 lecturers just for one course, taking turns to teach) and a few more tutors for a course~ This is so different from HKUST, well I guess this practice has its good and bad. Hmm, well instructors here like to get their students to purchase latest edition texbooks pretty much too! Well you know how much do they cost? Around 120-180 each!! Classes here are dispersed all around the whole freaking huge uni! And most classes dismiss at the hour and leaves you with no time to move on to your immediate next class (even worse, when you have to walk 10 minutes to another building for your class) And some of the lecture theatres are pretty old school with weird sittings and stuffy environment too =.=

From here, I noticed that HKUST is indeed a research university. My lecturers are all PHD holders, and they perform a lot of research (that's why most of their teachings are very boring!!!) I guess this made me realize the most suitable method for me to learn. I won't conclude now though...haha. I really wanna enjoy myself learning here, and to find back my momentum for studying.

Owh, one more thing!! There are like 85% Asians in the Economics and Business Faculty. And I hear people speaking Mandarin (Putonghua) all the time =.= This makes me wonder whether I'm in the right continent. Haha....

Well, I shall settle down with my courses soon. It's good news! I'm goinna get all the courses that I wanted to transfer! Yippee~~~