USM

I'll try to summarise up the things which I have been doing this past few days into one blog post. I became a temporary uni student at University Science Malaysia. Apparently the lectures that I attend were the same as the ones taken by pure biology and applied biology students. I asked Guisong to bring me along to his classes so that I could experience life which I missed when I dropped Form 6 for college. Well, comparing USM with the uni which I'm studying in, I can say that life at a local uni is quite different than life at University of Adelaide.

First of all, USM is HUGE!!! Its at least a few times larger than my city based North Terrace campus... But then Adelaide uni has one of the smallest campuses in Australia. They even have shuttle buses to take them around the uni and all of them are air conditioned(lucky them ~_~). Fees for the bus is RM60 for the entire stay at the uni. Cheap right?

2nd, although the amount of students are almost the same, I think they have a bit too much laboratories to cater for the small amount of students(tax money well spent guys =.="). Some of the labs look like they were from a horror movie while others contain tons of unusable laboratory equipment outside of their doors. The labs almost look like a section of my old high school. The buildings are not really well maintained as you can see that the paint has wore off on some of the old buildings. I suggest the authorities try to maintain or refurbish the old buildings instead of building and discarding old ones.

3rd, the USM students have tons of homework to do. Not assignments, just normal homework, high school style. UoA focuses more on assignments which require you to search for journals for material for your assignment where as for USM, if you can't finish your homework, just copy it! (high school style XD) In UoA, if you're caught plagiarizing, you'll be expelled straight away, and they are damn good with checking ~_~

4th, of the 2 lecturers (one of them a dean) which I've been to so far, both of them use a rojak mixture of English and Malay to teach. That's not right considering that there may be international students which don't understand Malay in that class. The materials presented were good but I observed some of the lecture notes were in Malay. The course should be in pure English and the lecturer should put more effort to change all of the materials into English. They could just copy some from a reference book since they use a lot of pictures from well known English reference books.

5th, lectures rock XD can play dotA at the back of the class while teacher is teaching XD

6th, Internet sucks, should make Internet access(or at least the local area network) accessible to all students on uni grounds.

7th, really nice of them to build lots of hostels for the students which are quite cheap.

8th, school activities are nicer to take part in compared to the more passive ones in UoA XD

Well, all in all, USM is quite a nice place to study despite some minor bad points. It has a really active chinese community, lots of nice foods could be found near the uni. And best of all, its on Penang Island!