USQ - A Review

- A Review

On first glance, the University of Southern Queensland seems pleasant enough. The car turns into a big, welcoming driveway with brickwork gates on either side. Bright yellow banners bearing a bright yellow phoenix wave proudly from literally every available hanging place. I note that some of the hanging places are yellow.

Unlike the two universities I have previously attended (I’m collecting), finding a park at USQ is easy. What’s this? An educational facility with the foresight to build places for its students to leave their cars while they attend learning? I suppose in UQ’s defence, when it was first built people still walked to uni, as horses hadn’t been invented yet. But USQ is not really anything like UQ. Not a sandstone building in sight, I head towards a series of buildings with completely logical and easy to understand letters and numbers on them. Everything is built around one big square, the building I am heading to, building R (for Refectory) is in the relative middle. Super easy.

Sheesh USQ sure likes yellow is a thought I have possibly 78 times before I sit down at my orientation seminar. The toilet doors are yellow, the signs are yellow, the powerpoint presentation that hasn’t started yet is yellow. A girl in a yellow singlet pushes past me and I squash up to make room for her. My knees near my ears, I turn my head to see a girl across the aisle, she’s wearing a yellow shirt and matching yellow cons. I remember that I saw her drive in: her car is yellow too. I begin to wonder if maybe there was a memo I missed, or perhaps an invitation to a cult.

The orientation is for the most part, interesting and informative. I am struck with the thought that all people should have the opportunity to attend university, even for a short while, just to experience the amazing wonder that is proper, compassionate support. Free counselling, cheap accommodation, interest free loans. There’s a group here that will help you with real estate agents giving you trouble while you’re studying, access to tens of thousands of academic journals, careers advice, hundreds of scholarships. They even offer scholarships to people studying non-traditional courses, like men in nursing or education, women in engineering and science. The whole world, every single person, should know the joy of education and the support of a good university.

There’s an unfortunate section of the orientation where a guy from the library tries to get us, the first-year online/distance students, to talk to one another. No dude, we are literally going to spend the next however many years behind keyboards, please don’t make us interact. Thankfully the people in my row seem to agree with me, and we don’t talk. Maybe I’m missing out on something here, but I’m not in the mood for this kind of forced interaction, and the guy running this bit is super irritating so I feel justified.

Awkward situations over, it’s time for collecting up a bunch of pamphlets, trying to navigate the blue card forms and sussing out if I can get some kind of scholarship for living in the country/generally being socially awkward. Then I go to get my photo taken for my ID. The security guy doing the photos has clearly been at it for some hours and looks exhausted so when he asks me how I am, I ask him genuinely how he is doing instead. He is appreciative and pleasant and we have a chat about how lame it is you can’t smile in passport photos. (Which is super lame, by the way).

After that some random engineering dude smiles at me and says hey and I decide to add an extra star rating to the review blog I am already writing in my mind. Sure, I don’t know how to do flirting/I have a lovely Boyfriend, but he had pretty hair, and maybe he thought my hair was pretty too. It was a nice moment.

There is a Phoenix Carnival, which is just like a normal carnival, except everything is yellow. I go to investigate and purchase some vegetarian dumplings from the Chinese Culture Society. I feel like they would have been good dumplings, except that on the advice of the guy behind the counter, I dunked them in a garlic soy sauce. This “sauce” apparently contained every single clove of garlic in Toowoomba, and I can still taste it. I obtained a free phoenix shirt, and, now fully indoctrinated into the USQ cult, decide to leave. On my way out there is an a cappella quartet consisting of 4 pubescent boys with surprisingly good voices. One of them makes eyes at me while they sing, “Can’t help Lovin’ that Gal of Mine” and I begin to wonder if I have left a boob out this morning or something.

As I drive away I try to find an amusingly named street that I saw driving in, but it seems to have disappeared. Perhaps it’s like the Room of Requirement and only shows up when you are in desperate need of a laugh. Luckily for us, unlike the Room of Requirement, this street does show up on maps.

Sure, I might be starting my second degree, but I never said I was mature.

All in all it was a good day. I took a star off for forced interaction guy, and half a star off for all the garlic ever. But then added one back on for nice hair boy. Four and a half out of five yellow stars, would recommend.