Words of encouragement

School starts tomorrow, and I'm more or less looking forward to it. I attended a faculty advising/intouduction session yesterday and got some info about my course, and some encouraging words from the chairman of the Electrical Engineering department.

"Welcome to the best Engineering faculty in the country... and among the top 5 or 6 in North America."

Ok lah, nothing much new there.

"Electrical Engineering is one of the toughest, if not THE toughest course in engineering."

"Bear in mind, this is a professional degree, so you can expect to typically put in anywhere between 42 to 54 hours a week on your work."

"In your first EE course, Fundementals of Electrical Engineering, there is, statistically a 30% failure rate among students... Look to your left, look to your right. Chances are one of the three of you are going to have to retake that course."

Ok...

"A lot of you are interested to find our more about entry into our honours programme... We take in only the best, as determined by your cumulative GPA... Every year we take in anywhere between 20-25 students for the honours programme."

Wah lan eh... I'm going to have to work my ass off to get into the honours programme lah. At that session, there were about 150 people or so in attendance, and it wasn't even compulsory, so there might be even more people in the EE programme. Got lots of work ahead of me.

And I still don't have a cellphone (as they call it here). To get one, they need to do a credit check, and I need to have a credit card which has been with me for more than 6 months. My card's only been with me for 3 months, I've got to either wait another 3 months, or wait for my friend to get here and ask her to let me use her card to sign up, and then transfer the bills to me after my card hits 6 months.

It's hard to make friends without a cellphone, when everyone is exchanging numbers, and the best you can offer is your msn contact. So I got to wait till Sept 5th at the earliest, when my friend gets here.

Some more shots of my room added to my flickr set, so you can see them if you want. Some new photos not in any sets in my photo stream as well. Got one of the photo collage that a few of my friends gave to me at the airport. My friends rock.