First Week on Campus

Well we've almost finished our first week on campus so I figured I'd do a quick summary of the week's events.

Monday and Tuesday we were on the RMIT City campus, which was definitely full of activity. We started the mornings handing out fliers for "O Week Questions", which prompt people to log onto a website and fill out a survey. Based on their results and if they indicate they're interested in hearing from us, we call the numbers they provide and ask when a good time to meet up would be. So far we've have a good response from the RMIT City campus, but haven't had much luck getting in contact with the students. Apparently the results continue to come in for a few weeks after the fliers are handed out, so I'm still optimistic. In the afternoon we have been going around doing "Soularium" with people. Basically the Soularium is a survey based on pictures. There are 40 or so cards with pictures on them and we asked different questions to people where they have to choose a picture that represents their answer. I really like this form of survey because it allows people to be creative and caters to different types of thinking.

On Wednesday we went to the RMIT Bundoora campus which is about an hour tram ride away. The campus isn't in the city so it's a very different climate. Since there is no on-campus housing their either, students basically just attend for class and then leave. It's hard to find people sitting around by themselves or relaxing in between classes, making it difficult to do the surveys. We passed out O Week Fliers there as well, and got some really quick responses. We have just followed up with a few of them, but they have been promising so far. Josh(one of the guys from Tech) is going to be going with Nathan(a student leader at RMIT Bundoora) to meet with a guy interested in Student Life next week. Hopefully we will have more meetings set up from the O Week responses as well.

One of the highlights of the day came from the east campus side of Bundoora which is really secluded and has almost no activity. Nathan had told me that he passed some kangaroos on his way into school that morning and bet they were still there. It didn't take much more than that to get me headed over immediately. It turns out we came across 3 kangaroos sitting in a field right next to the campus. They were 30 or so feet away and weren't really doing anything. There was a big wall on the back side of them so I decided to climb the other side to get closer. I ended up coming up right on the other side of them and getting some great pictures. I tried to scare them toward the rest of the group but they would only hop a few feet away from me. They are such interesting creatures and it was awesome to just see them in the wild. Nathan told us a story about gorge that was in between the campus and his house where he saw a heard of 50 or 60 of them one day when riding his bike. I can't imagine that. 3 was cool enough for me...50 or 60 would just be too much to handle.

Today(Thursday), we went back to Bundoora since La Trobe(the other university we'll be working on) still isn't back in session. Tomorrow we'll be going to RMIT City and then taking the afternoon a little bit easier.

Tomorrow night we are going to a footy game again. This is a big rivalry game between the Carlton Blues(the team I'm going for) and the Collinwood Magpies(the team the rest of the team except for 2 others are going for). They're both Melbourne teams and it's in the 100,000 seat arena so it's going to be intense!

Saturday the plan is go to the Great Ocean Road which is a road that...goes along the ocean, imagine that. Apparently there is an opportunity to see "heaps"(a really common word here) of koalas and some beautiful sites, so I'll definitely be taking the camera and hoping to snag some good shots.

It seems like it's a pretty constant stream of activity here. The weekends are going to be packed with touristy fun stuff and during the week the days are long and full with ministry stuff, so I predict being pretty tired when it's all said and done. I figure I can rest when I get home, but I definitely want to make the best of my time here.

Hope things are going well. I'll definitely update after the weekend with hopefully good footy results and some koala sitings!