mew-faye

"I promise to give updates this weekend." - Durrah, 17th July 2016. Two weekends passed without any updates. Janji Melayu. Hahahaha sorry for the delay, the first weekend was filled with me going to more than five open houses and weddings while last weekend was the same except that I was also too tired. So here's a tediously dull long post to make up for it. 

So yeah. College kid now hewhewhew. I'm repeating myself for the 163738393th time - I'm doing Monash University Foundation Year (MUFY - pronounced as Ma - fee but us ex-SAians insist on calling it MewFaye instead) in Sunway College, where 16373839 other students are there doing A-Levels, Australian Matriculation, Sunway Foundation in Arts/Science, Canadian Matriculation (CIMP), and all those accounting certificates I can never comprehend. And as it is also connected to Sunway University, there are degree as well as masters students there too. The probability of seeing the same face two days in a row is very low. Honestly saying, in the beginning I wouldn't even do this if it wasn't for the JPA bursary and my parents' persuasion but I'm starting to be thankful to be one of the... muffins (YES THAT IS WHAT WE ARE CALLED DON'T LAUGH). 

There are a lot of residences nearby to those hailing from faraway states or other countries. From what I have known so far, most foreigners stay at Nadayu28 (which I don't know where the exact position is although I've seen the building several times otw to Sunway). Then there's Sun-U Residence which is the closest to Sunway Uni and is the first stop if you walk using the canopy walkway. Most, if not all, Yayasan Peneraju scholars stay there. YP people can be identified as large groups of Malay boys/girls walking together hahaha and they're mostly doing accounting. They also wear baju kurung/ baju melayu/ kurta/ jubah on Fridays too. Then there's Sunway-Monash Residence (SMR) which is further away. All JPA bursary holders who chose to go to Sunway College are staying there. 

Moved at SMR a day before the orientation started. Initially, my room was on the 22nd floor, which is the highest one. There are 12 units in each floor, with 8 bedrooms in each unit if I'm not mistaken. Each bedroom is equipped with a bed, a wardrobe, an aircond, desk and chair, a mini fridge, a television (I'm not kidding it's stuck there on the wall but there's only the basic channels without Astro), free WiFi, free laundry service and either a shelf or two rows of racks on the wall. It was VEERRRYYYY fancy indeed and I'm thankful to be able to stay there for free (although technically my house is like 15-20 minutes away but who can say no to free things and there is no need to drive and I can go back anytime). And I'm lucky to have Amira to be with me too hahaha. Fun fact: In form 5 we were tuition mates, sat beside each other in class in school, got the same results for SPM and now we're going to the same university and taking the same subjects for MUFY too, although we're planning to do different degrees but yeah we are currently living in the same apartment unit, just a room away. Last week though, we had to move from the 22nd floor to the 18th floor instead so that was super tiring. 

The night view from above

Back at the 22nd floor my bedroom was literally behind the SUNWAY sign on top of the building HAHAHAHA

Orientation was okay I guess? It was from Wednesday to Friday, and continued on Monday before classes started on Tuesday. Met up with Tiffany and Sharmilee who are also doing MUFY yay on the first day. There was a session with the student council who were from the January intake (there's Pui Si too as the Secretary hehehe), a tour around Sunway Uni & Monash Uni, group games, more group games, talks and more talks, library tour, classes registration etc. The library is cool, there's even thousands of movies to watch from ahahah (although I haven't tried watching them yet). 

Let me explain to you how the system works in MUFY in terms of classes. You have to choose 4 subjects, with English being a compulsory one. There are around 400-500 MUFY July intake students (so much more than I expected)? And you get to choose your own classes among the ones available, you choose 1 group/class among like 13 different groups/classes for each subject so you study with different people in each subject unless you decide to choose the same ones with your friends. And if you arrange them correctly, you might get one day off. I'm taking English, Chemistry, Biology and Mathematics. There are 3 types of maths; Fundamental Mathematics (basic Maths), Mathematics (like SPM Add Maths) and Advanced Mathematics (engineering/specialized Maths). On the first day of orientation, we had to take a Maths Placement Test and from the results, they classified us into either the Focus group (super smart ones that should consider taking Advanced Maths), the Suggested groups (pls just take Fundamental Maths if u don't want to suffer) and the average ones who are free to take whatever. Thankfully all us SA-ians are in the average ones. All of us, including two other new friends of ours arranged to be in the same classes for each subjects hahaha except for Tiffany who's taking Physics and ICT instead while Sharmilee's taking Physics instead of Bio. 

People in MUFY are generally nice. The variety is endless too. There are people from Indonesia, Australia, Bangladesh, Pakistan, Cambodia, Zambia, Brunei, Sri Lanka, Yemen, South Korea, etc. The ages vary too. There are 16/17 year olds who took O-Levels taking Advanced Maths and 19/20 year olds who took A-Levels or ADTP before changing programmes. Even my apartment unit is shared with people from Brunei, Indonesia and Australia. Also I don't know if it's true or not but this guy with red hair admitted being a Pledis Entertainment trainee and will be debuting in 2020 hMmMmmmm well then. 

The classes are manageable so far EXCEPT FOR MATHS. It's compulsory for all students to buy a graphing calculator (GC) that costs RM560 (RM700++ outside) asfdgfhjkl so expensive and to be used for a year only? So there we were PM-ing seniors on FB bargaining for the best price of their secondhand calculators. I've gotten mine for RM390 yay will probably sell it back after I'm done. And English class feels like being in an all-girls school again as most of us in the class are girls. My English teacher reminds me of Koharu Sugawara / Kri San, and her classes are always fun. And what we're taught with are very useful in real life I'm like wahh. 

Fallacies. The group quizzes we had about this were fun and in both times, my group won hehehe free lemon sweets.

For Bio as we're asked to prepare the lecturer's lecture notes from online beforehand, people just bring their laptops over although I just print them, double-sided with 3 slides in one page with space to write additional notes on the side. On the first day of class we were already bombarded with our research project to prepare for that carries 20% of our marks rip.

Bio - Through The Looking Glass jk im not Alice

And I'm a little worried for Chemistry as there's a lot of people repeating the subject because they were unsatisfied with their examination marks. 

Flame Test with Winnie

A typical week day goes like this: Waking up at 6:30 to pray and wash up. Goes to eat breakfast consisting of either toasted (yes I brought a toaster DONT JUDGE) waffles/bread with peanut butter/Nutella (YES I BROUGHT THOSE TOO) or cereal with milk or with microwaved scrambled eggs (YES EVERYONE BROUGHT THEM) (THE MICROWAVE IS ALREADY THERE) with Milo or Nestum with Amira and Ira (our other housemate from Kedah doing MUFY too) at the common area. Then we go down to take the bus to Sunway Uni at around 8 if there's class at 8.30 or at 8.30 if class starts at 9.45. There's two buses, one being a free shuttle bus stopping all around Sunway but will stop at Sun-U Residence if you want to go to college so you'll have to walk a little bit from there, and the school bus (it's literally a yellow bus with the word BAS SEKOLAH outside) going directly to and from Sunway Uni. We go by the latter, with it being chock full every time (but the bus comes back every 15 minutes or so). There are so, so many Koreans staying in SMR going to Sunway for whatever reason. Reaching there, we meet with our other friends and walk to class. For the first few days we kept on getting lost because there were so many different buildings and so many floors, so thank god there's a campus app that helps with navigation. There are times we have to rush like mad to go from the North-East building to South-West in five minutes or vice versa and go to different floors. As the elevator moves at a turtle's pace, we sometimes have to reluctantly go up or down four flights of stairs at one time. For break we either hang around in the library or eat either indoors or outdoors. For indoors, there are two cafeterias; the old one far inside (which resembles a school canteen with a lot of vending machines too) and the new one at the entrance of the uni (very modern-looking with a lot of variety). Outside, we've only tried going to Rock Cafe which is a very large food-court like area with a lot of cheap food and 1TO8, a very hipster-looking place from the outside but is also like a mini foodcourt inside. 

Yes, the food is expensive. Even normal nasi campur will be around RM4-6 while the food you see above is RM5-9. ONE POPULAR BELIEF IS THAT SUNWAY STUDENTS GO TO SUNWAY PYRAMID EVERY DAY THAT IS NOT TRUE AT ALL. Then classes resume, with most days ending at 2:45PM. Amira and I either stay back to do our work or walk back. The walk back through the canopy walk is 1 km (YES I GOOGLED) and we have to walk through Monash University before arriving SMR. 

Generally the walk looks like this

Sometimes we'd walk down the road a bit before hopping on the shuttle bus. It takes a longer time but it's nice just sitting there listening to the radio and watching the view and people of Sunway. We'd probably watch a movie once a week on my laptop online; so far we've watched 10 Things I Hate About You, We Need To Talk About Kevin and Perfume: The Story of A Murderer. We watched the last one with Tiffany joining in, we managed to smuggle her in SMR somehow. As that day was Friday last week, that night they went to Sunway Pyramid together while I went to the same place too to have dinner with my family as I wasn't going home. But yeah on normal days too we'd probably send in our laundry and go to either the in-campus 7 Eleven / The Lunch Box for dinner. Or just make scrambled eggs again. By the end of this all I will probably have tried all the instant microwaveable 7E food lel. Then we together with Ira will sit by the common area and do our homework/study before sleeping at 11-ish. And the cycle continues.

There was a one-day orientation camp last week organized by the student council, with around only 120+ of us participating? Among our group of friends only Amira and I went hahaha. We were all separated into 22 groups of 5 and had to complete more than ten tasks around the themes Courage, Strength, Intelligence, Endurance, and Agility with marks given. Before that there was the typical create your group name and group cheer but they were hilarious. Some that I remember were Victoria's Secret, Ratchet, Halogens (bcs they were group 17) and 11 Michelles (bcs the group leader's name was Michelle what even). It started at 10:30(?) and ended at 4:30PM, with both outdoor tasks and indoor tasks. Most outdoor tasks involve two groups to battle it out. Some highlights of the day: Courage theme being us having to go in a pitch dark classroom and search for as much "things" lying around in five minutes. Agility having us playing some Running Man-ish game where we have to go look for candies in all the classrooms or corridors in that floor in fifteen minutes while two hunters chased us with a Nerf gun to shoot us and eliminate us. Intelligence having us playing a pop quiz with us failing in History (UMNO was not the answer for everything after all) and charades (couldn't stop laughing when two of my group mates acted out 50 Shades HAHAHAHHAHA). 

From left: Nicole, Potato, Alfred, Shaun, Alfred 2

Played football, catch-the-flag, frisbee, captain ball and a lot more games which ended up with us all absolutely exhausted and 2733992 shades darker. One person in another group even fainted and was sent to the hospital. Our legs couldn't function properly by the end of it that we were wobbling whenever we walked up/down the stairs. It took me one week to walk properly again without my muscles screaming btw. We finished half an hour earlier and just sat in the hall before the prize-giving ceremony. There was a victor for each theme and my group won one (although I don't remember which one it is)!

sobbing on the inside bcs of this pose

 They also announced that there would be a competition to post the most creative picture of your group on Instagram, hence why I posted this:

Bloopers:

All in all, it's been fun.. so far. Not looking forward to the topic tests and internal assessments. Still haven't joined any clubs yet so that's something to look forward to. And yes, it's been a bit of a culture shock after studying in an all-girls school for 5 years but nothing too extreme. Still hoping to get more outside of my comfort zone and make more new friends. Also hoping that I can tolerate Maths more. So that is all so far. Thank you for reading! Here's a song I've been humming/shouting-alone-in-bedroom to this past week ahaha have a great week ahead!

Amy Winehouse - Valerie