Sydney Life

It's not in the tradition of freshers to divulge the pleasures and pains of their much cherished O-Week, but for the benefit of the uninitiated, tradition can and will be broken…

If I hadn’t had friends pass through the blessed ‘O’ in previous years, I wouldn’t have been prepared for my own, and so I feel a small guide to those still in the dark in terms of O-Week is in order.

Firstly, O-Week for college kids is a lot different to what it is for other students. Basically, college kids hit the bottle, the can, the cask and the keg with bladder-busting and often stomach-churning enthusiasm. This is not to say a college O-Week is just an all-expenses-paid binge, it’s… more than that! There are games, competitions, inter-collegiate BBQs and toga parties, rituals, pranks, pub crawls, club crawls, impromptu parties… and on top of that the freedom to get involved in any of the university-wide O-Week events.

For all the non-college new students, there’s still plenty to do and more than enough to get excited about. One of the major highlights of Sydney Uni’s O-Week has to be ‘C & S Live!’, where hundreds of Sydney Uni clubs and societies vie for your attention and membership with all manner of freebies offered at their stalls. Product placement is big business here, with names such as Xbox and Vodaphone taking prime positions in the two-day event in return for their sponsorship. Having been to the Melbourne Uni and ANU equivalents, I can vouch that Sydney Uni has the widest range and highest quality clubs and societies I’ve seen; and whether you’re a college fresher, or what we college kids call a newt – anyone not from a college – there’s guaranteed to be something there for you.

So what about the rest of O-Week? The University of Sydney Union (USU) organizes day and night activities with everything from free breakfasts to miniature train tours, fireworks, dance nights, BBQ lunches & dinners, uni bands, DJs, happy hours at Hermann’s and even outdoor movies. To coincide with this, the academic side of Sydney Uni goes out of its way to make welcome its new students to their respective faculties through the program SWOT (Sydney Welcome, Orientation and Transition), where students are encouraged to attend faculty welcome sessions, general talks on transition, study, and finances, and even lectures on improving specific academic skills. All of this combined makes for a seriously jam-packed three days, so it takes a bit of organisation on your part to make sure you get where you’re meant to be when you’re meant to be, and also so you are able to sample a bit of everything before you start uni proper.

So now you know – or at least I hope you know – a little more about O-Week. Don’t be intimidated if you intend going to a college, all the games are in good humour and nobody is forced to participate if they don’t feel comfortable about it. Either way, O-Week is a hell of a lot of fun for freshers and for newts, as long as you make the most of your time and organise yourself a bit in advance. There’s only one O-Week, ever, and despite the 2nd and 3rd years’ attempts to relive their fun times either by volunteering in stalls or acting as fresher supervisors in college, O-Week’s really all about the new kids, so make the most of it!