Shopping for Classes, Part 3

To register for classes, you sign onto HKU Portal and click on Student Connect. To register classes, you find individual lectures on the “Optional Courses” search page and scroll down the list. Once you find it, you click on it, which prompts you for a lecture selection, which almost always is “A” since most classes don’t have enough enrollment to warrant multiple lectures and professors. Make sure to save between adding classes.

When you add a class, a “TS” appears next to it, meaning the department offering the course has to approve you for that specific course. If the department doesn’t approve you, you get a “TN” and if you’re approved, you get sent for approval by your super-departmental faculty, which while pending is assigned “TW.” Once you get a “TW,” you’re pretty much approved, but they can still deny your selection, giving you a “TN.” If all goes well, all your classes are now “TA” or fully approved to take.

Upon attending class, you are told to sign up for a tutorial (what I would call a section), the times of which are not publicized nor solidified. If you have a problem making any of the tutorial slots, say if you have lectures during each of the tutorials offered, then you should talk to the TA and or professor so that you can be accommodated.

Some classes have a convenient sign-up process online, which serves to confuse in its own right. It’s a competition to sign up for tutorials first so that you get the best time slot, which basically means it is neither too late in the day nor too early in the morning, considering existing schedule blocks for other lectures. The tutorial enrollment is only compared to the lecture enrollment once the add/drop period ends.

Needless to say, I have now finished registration in its entirety.

It was painful to go through, and seemed to add more corners that needed desperately to be cut off. Why couldn’t the Student Connect system for lecture registration be integrated with tutorial registration for better convenience in schedule arrangement? It would make logistics smoother and more operable, allowing professors and TAs to teach rather than arrange tutorial slots for the masses.

So now I’ve attended all of my tutorials at least once. With tutorials having started on the third week of instruction, I’ve already been to all my lectures at least two or three times by this point (with the exception of Cantonese, which has no tutorials), and for the most part, they have been good.

For my Traditional Chinese Society class (SOCI0052) the enrollment stands at thirteen students, split into two tutorials led by the professor himself. Last week, we had a typhoon level eight, which canceled morning and early afternoon classes, so we were all lumped into one section. This week, however, the two tutorials met separately, and mine only has five students. We presented our proposals for the ethnographic research project due in a month, and apparently mine was a good idea (details forthcoming).

For Hong Kong and the World (POLI0019), the tutorial was relaxed and focused on discussions of the readings and the lectures specifically (as the professor usually brings guest speakers in). We went over Hong Kong’s global competitive as a haven for multinational companies and international financial institutions and speculated as to its ability to maintain any such competitiveness.

In the tutorial for Introduction to Arts of Asia: Past and Present (FINE1008), the professor served as the tutorial leader, though she has one TA for her class. There, we discussed the major artworks (of various mediums) and went over the nitty gritties that we were to be tested on later.

In the tutorial for Phonetics (LING2004), my particular section saw the professor teaching. He went over a homework assignment that we have to turn in by next Wednesday. Though his approach is explicitly observational, I still feel that he’s trying to prescriptively teach the local students how to speak English like an American or a Brit.

For Humanity in Globalization (POLI0078), I just had my first tutorial. The lecture immediately prior, we watched a documentary on the Rwandan Genocide, to which we reflected upon in tutorial. While really quite depressing, the syllabus has topics in the future that involve logos whereas these first two weeks have really invoked the shock factor and pathos.

“Peux ce que veux,” non?

Shopping for Classes, Part 1

At UCSD and, as far as I can figure, most American universities, enrollment works in a simple way: you sign up for classes months in advance, before the start of the term, and once the term starts, there is a certain period of time to alter your schedule.

Here at HKU, the university has scheduled out add/drop period for courses to coincide with the first two weeks of classes. This means that shopping for classes, in which we attend say ten classes to choose four or five of them, is a way of life. Though I was warned at the Hong Kong orientation at UCSD last May that this would be the case, actually experiencing it has been quite different.

I hope to sign up for five classes plus Cantonese, and planned to go to eleven classes to see which ones to choose. Out of those eleven, I have decided not to check out two of them. So far I have attended four, all of which I feel I want to take. Because I still have five classes to check out, this creates a problem I like the content of the courses and have become somewhat immune to professors’ individual teaching styles. Whoever it is, I still take extensive notes and attend most every lecture.

Welcome to the University of Hong Kong

The University of Hong Kong held its orientation for non-local students this last Friday, August 28. Though I appreciate the effort, much of the event seemed to drag on and students found themselves socializing with each other more than listening to the presentations, making the presentations hard to hear. Apart from the main event, there were a few subsequent components to orientation that I found were much more informative and useful than the opening act.

The day was opened with all of the non-local (mainland Chinese and international) students gathered in the assembly hall of Main Building. My HKU buddy informed me that, as that building is one of the oldest and most architecturally significant edifices on campus, important events are held there to give a good first impression of the university.

Unfortunately, since the hall is so old, it’s also quite small, and many of the students could not fit. They were directed to nearby rooms where the presentation was broadcasted live to them. What happened at that first event were mostly formalities—introduction of the administration, various resources available to us, and a plug for the Chinese-language courses they would be offering to us in the coming semesters.

As a bad sign, I couldn’t understand a significant amount of what they were saying. Though while listening closely I could gather 75-90%, I’m still uncomfortable with the current degree of comprehension. But I’ll get to language in another post.

About those Chinese-language courses, I’ve decided to take Cantonese for Foreigners 1, as I have a pretty good Mandarin foundation, and figured that it could be good to get as local as possible. I think that the biggest thing I’ve found here is how profoundly bad my Cantonese is. And though a Canadian exchange student “called shenanigans” on me for not speaking Cantonese, she was highly uninformed of my upbringing, but I’ll talk about that more in that upcoming language post.

They provided us with a “light lunch” which was actually quite filling with three half-sandwiches, an apple, and a juice box. At that point most non-local students were done with their orientation; however, American students had an additional meeting with a representative from the U.S. consulate in Hong Kong.

That meeting started with her asking where everyone was from. Starting with California, about a third of the American students raised their hands. The other two thirds were from various places scattered around the country. As many of the students from California (undoubtedly mostly University of California students) were Asian Americans, my roommate mentioned that night that Asian American students being a big chunk of students studying abroad in Asia should be no surprise, but I informed him that the UCs have a large Asian population, and still more students, at least at UCSD, went to Europe for study abroad.

Like I said earlier, I’m in good company.

At the meeting basically said the standard “don’t make yourself stand out” stuff and told us how to handle ourselves if we were to get arrested. The consulate would provide a list of attorneys to help, but if someone’s incarcerated, he or she will be visited every quarter by a member of the U.S. consulate in Hong Kong.

Someone asked how serious jaywalking in Hong Kong is, and the representative said that she didn’t know, but it would be safer to cross at the crosswalks and she herself prefers to wait a couple seconds after the light turns green to cross, allowing those running red lights to do so.

An hour after that, my faculty had a quick session (that lasted an hour and a half) on how to register for classes. It was really complicated, but more on that later. Off to class now!