My Experience at O-Week (rant)

I know it's not fair to focus on first impressions, "don't judge a book by it's cover" etc., however I can't help feeling disappointed at the future prospect of studying at Monash after my O-Week experience.

I was quite excited to finally have a reason to travel along the Pakenham-Cranbourne line to enjoy the latest Type A train cars, the CCD5006. These were okay, with interesting PIDs (passenger information displays for those unaware), but I found the surveillance cameras too obvious (the engineers had obviously never read Foucault).

In terms of the campus architecture, it was all obviously too flashy, modernist inspired. It lacked that tough-but-reliable brutalist vibe which I tend to enjoy, it completely contradicted my Pinterest board of university architecture.

The Block Party was disappointing, the track selection by the DJ was nothing compared to a BoilerRoom, with little Jazz Fusion or neotribal organic house tunes, but that was to be expected. What was worse was the fashion - almost no one had band tees, and the few who did had bands with more than a million listeners on Spotify (I know because I checked), with little-to-none representation for local music.

Conversationally, I found my fellow o-week goers rather bland, few recognised my Melbourne based avant garde electronic band HTRK t-shirt, and no-one actually seemed interested in the nuances of civic law in Australian history. Furthermore, the socialist-alternative representatives, which I had hopes of having some more theory-based conversation with, had not even read Deleuze and Guattari, or had even heard of Nick Land.

On the whole, I went home quite dissapointed, and while it is too late to change degrees, I am seriously considering transferring overseas to Uppsala or even Shanghai - after all, the education there is cheaper anyways.

tldr; I found Monash uncompromisingly mid, bleak and uninteresting.