Doodle #170 : Transition Camp Day 3

Okay, here's part 3 of my personal account of Transition Camp.

Collapsed on my bed the night before at 3.30. Took me under 5 minutes to doze off, which was a miracle. It usually took 15 mins minimum of tossing and turning. But I guess fatigue does that to you.

On the upside, it was announced the night before that morning exercise was CANCELLED! This is the part you join me as I virtually jump for joy. Jump people, jump! Though when you take that into account, that only gave me roughly an extra half hour worth of sleep. Hence, I decided to skip breakfast, somewhat. I vaguely remember groggily dragging myself over to the buffet tent, and eating smth. Porridge, I take it?

Gathered at the hall again to start the day. A game I rather enjoyed playing, though I'll only take on the role of observer and guide this time round. It's called "Traffic Jam" and is essentially a puzzle-like game where you have to sort out how to get everyone across from one side to the other. So many details, shan't explain the game. Hee. Just know that it's rather fun, despite getting pretty boring once you solved it.


P1 and P2 setting up. Speaking of setting up, we didn't have enough equipment. Well this is a bit of a jiffy. Improvised and managed to get everything running.


Coming up with a strategy. ;)

There's actually a very simple trick to it. Once you find the pattern, it's as easy as 1,2,3. There's no need to memorize any moves and whatnot. :D

Once that was done, we all headed back to the hall (for relief from the heat). 'tis time to play the video. :D The prizes for The Amazing Race held during the second day was given out, and P2 took the top spot! Feels like a repeat of the year before. Legacy of P2. Gahahah.


Le hard work being played on screen.


Dr. Saravanan summing up the camp and giving a small talk.

Finally, before we were set to check out and pack up, we did one last thing together, as Pharmacy students. Three years back, during the pioneer's batch camp, they did a routine called the "Funky Chicken" and took home the prize during the evening performance. Hence, it's become somewhat of a.. tradition that we Pharmily has to uphold.


Soo giving everyone the lowdown on the performance. I've only seen it once. T'was fun to dance along. :p

That pretty much concluded the entire camp. It felt like the 3 days passed so fast. I feel as though I learnt so much more than I gave (I admit, I was not the best of guides) but that's how it is. A learning experience. It was the first time I ever took on the role of a guide, and only my third time to a camp. Definitely a memorable 3 days.

Grabbed my bags, checked out, and headed off to find the rest of the Pharmacy students.


Well.. It's been fun. Time to get back to life, and begin the first semester of my second year as a Pharmacist to be. :)

So much to do, so little time.

Doodle #169 : Transition Camp Day 2

Let me state here that the day did not begin on the best of notes. I had the foolhardiness of downing 3 cups of coffee in under 10 minutes roughly 30 minutes before I slept. It was only the first night of camp and we still had so much to do. After the pep talk by Soo the night before, I was pumped to make sure I performed adequately as a student guide. Perhaps a bit too much.

Let's just say I did not exactly sleep soundly that night, and probably neither did Joshiee.

But enough about that. The second day kicked off pretty early, at 7 in the morning in fact. I was up and about by 6.30, no thanks to the numerous times I awoken throughout the sleep. Exactly every 2 hours, 1am, 3am, 5am.

Scurried over to the nearby field for the first event of the day, aerobics exercise. It was the same as what we had done the year before only.. this time we had a more.. lively drill instructor. I shall not get into the details, but it involved a whole lot of yelling, screaming, some howling, a bit of dancing, and a tad of eecentrism.

Now that's something you don't experience everyday.

Moving on to what I would consider one of the most fun events of camp (which leads on to a surprise in the third day).

Le Amazing Race! So basically, each team is given a list of tasks and is supposed to photograph / depict each situation denoted in the list. The important thing here is to get creative with your shots as that'll net you points. Creativity / teamwork / passion. (: Yeaps. Unlike Genting however, we were all confined to the resort, and the beach. Still a pretty small place when you think of the building complexes we ran about the year before.

Nevertheless.. the teams were all hyped up (somewhat), from what I've seen in the pictures. The list.. wasn't all that spectacular, but the results definitely were!



P1 in action, setting for their shots.

When I told them to use anything at their disposal.. they kind of did. Gahaha. That aside, sprinting about under the hot sun was not my kind of activity. How I wish we had the cooling seaside breeze, the clouds above to provide much needed shelter against the sun's searing heat. So much for wishful thinking.

An hour into the race, time was up. For once, we were ahead of schedule. Or rather, the time allocated for that one activity was much more than we needed. Debriefed the juniors and gave them some much needed free time. After all, there was much to be done. There was still the evening activity to plan. Half the guides stayed on to help out with the performance preparations while the other half went to judge the photos taken.

I skipped lunch, didn't want to risk anything since I still felt rather giddy from the whole ordeal that transpired the night before.

Even now I wonder how on earth did I manage to survive through that Time Management talk I gave. Being on edge does not help. Haven't spoken in front of a crowd in over 3 months, and I was about to blurt out a whole lot of nonsense. Well. That's exactly what happened. I doubt I'll ever get over this stage fright thing anytime soon. It's been a long time since my glory days back in college.

On the upside, I felt refreshed right after my session was over. Shall not let that slip up drag me down for the rest of the camp. Cheered for Joshiee's session, a tad too loud at times. Hee.


T'was discussion time for the juniors.

After a short break, it was off! I hadn't even had time to finish editing the music for the night. Somehow or rather, I became the "sound guy". Well, least there's smth for me to do to make myself useful. And I kind of like these kind of things. :D

Everyone was herded (yeah, pretty sure I used the right word) off for the Nature Walk. It's times like this I contemplate feigning illness. Hah! But who am I kidding, I know I need the sun and a work out.


Le kids lining up.

How does one describe a "Nature Walk"? I got so much closer to Mother Nature! I traversed the jungle path courting disaster walking so close to the edge with nothing more than some vines and my wit to keep me on my feet!

Close enough.

But truth be told, it wasn't that bad. There weren't any mozzies, that's a plus. The only thing was the congestion! I swear, everywhere you go in Malaysia, be it in a car or on foot, you get stuck in traffic. :/

After what seemed like an eternity almost an hour.. we reached a clearing, what I assumed was our actual destination.


Behold! Horrible photography.

Which isn't the point. Anyway. We reached this lighthouse, overlooking the ocean. Did I mention how hot the day was? How the sun seemed to glare right at you? How the intense heat seemed to pierce right through every inch of your soul, setting it alight?

It was then I heard some people bursting out into the Pokemon theme song at the back. Mind you, I was so tempted to sing along. Well.. I did. :D On the bright (literally) side, the view was spectacular.


Uhm.. crowd was moving, didn't want to fall behind, lifted phone into air and just snapped a few. Haha.

The way back was much better. We took the good ol' paved road. No more slithering about overhanging branches and dodging vines and trying to keep your feet away from the cliff and what lay below. Solid flat ground, just the way I liked it. So much more room, less stuffy, more airy, cooling, oh so gooooood. Reached camp in record time!

Everyone was then given a short break, to freshen up and relax before the much anticipated performance night. Watched my group practice a few more times.


Go P1! :D

I was whisked off to help out with the sound preparation then. So much editing, so little time. My clothes were still wet (splashed myself with water towards the end of the walk), so I must say, the hall felt a tad chilly. Finished everything just in time for a quick dinner, after freshening up. Oh, it felt sooooo relaxing in the shower. Didn't want to get out. :p

Well. It's time folks!


The platform for tonight.

The spirit in the hall was pretty high,


P1 in action! :)


P4 setting up later on.

As I watch them perform, a wave of pride washed over me. Hee. :3 They were so good too.

But, the performance that stole the night (for me) was this,


Go P2! Wigglewigglewiggle YEAHH.

Despite only getting runner up, in my heart, they won. :) The winner for this year? MBBS again... another sketch. Haihhh. Well. T'was funny, I'll give it that.


Before the festivities were over, the MBBS students gathered, to perform... something. Didn't quite catch what they were actually doing over the background noise. Supposedly a suprise for Pharmacy and Psychology students..? Beats me. *shrug


A final debriefing by none other than the MUPhaS president himself, Soo!

Called it a day then. Or rather, only the juniors did. The guides, myself included had a post activity meeting and evaluation. Sharing our thoughts and hearts, keng sam si (in cantonese) Gahaha.

Day only ended at 3.30 for me. Everyone else went to bed earlier. Didn't want to keep everyone awake when only 1 could work at that time. Prepared the video presentation for the last day. That concludes this post, at long last. :)

Stay tuned for Part 3! :)

Doodle #168 : Transition Camp Day 1

I may or may not have mentioned this but some time ago, I got drafted to be a student guide for this year's Jeffrey Cheah School of Medicine and Health Sciences Transition Camp 2012. It was a pretty last minute thing as ABJ and I were only notified of this roughly a week before the camp was set to start. Actually, both of us had been told that neither of us had been selected to go on the camp, so we were pretty much caught off guard. T'was pretty funny though, I was beside him when he got the call and when my phone rung later, I knew I was selected. Which makes up a total of 8 guides, U Jean, Devi, Blondiee, Mei Yi, Seasons, Weng, ABJ and I.

I had no idea what I was in for.

In preparation for the camp, we had several meetings to delegate the tasks to ensure everything ran smoothly. Being the last to get aboard this ship, I was pretty lost then. Not to mention it was my first time taking on such a role. "But hey, how hard could it possibly get? I just have to be there, and guide.. right?" I thought to myself.

The first day started off on a very early note, I had to get up at 6am in order to get to uni on time to help set up the stations on campus. It's been 3 months since I tried even getting up remotely close to that time so I was pretty groggy when I got to campus. After a pretty messy start, we got everyone to the briefing room at 6-2-02. Name tags and manuals were handed out and the juniors were sorted out into their respective groups. They were then given a short pre-camp briefing as well as one on the MUPhaS group and all the Pharmacy activities we had last year. Sort of like a teaser, I s'pose.

10am, departure! Loaded up the buses and we pushed off to PNB Ilham, Port Dickson for the 3 day camp. Pharmacy was assigned Bus 5, but after loading all the student's luggages, the equipment and miscellaneous items.. there was none left for us Student Guides. 6 of us were diverted over to Bus 6. Le tumpang Psycho bus!


Welcome to PNB Ilham. :D


The moment you hit PD, the sun hits you. Hard. The longer I was there, the more I missed the cool air of Genting the prior year. First things first, everyone got checked in. Or rather we tossed our luggage into one of the rooms while waiting to be officially checked in and getting our keys.

In the meantime..


Photo doesn't really do the seaside view justice. Wait till the tide comes in, then it's just wow. (:


Le juniors getting their first briefing of the camp.



Om nom nom lunch. PD food.

T'was on to the first game of the camp. What we call "Pick and Choose", I still don't see how the name relates that much though. Basically, you split the team into 'throwers' and 'retrievers'. As their name implies, the thrower throws balls into baskets and should they miss, it's the retriever's job to.. retrieve those balls and toss it back to the throwers for another attempt. Each team is given 5 baskets to place at 4 set distances, however they please. As you can expect, the further away the basket is, the more points one garners when a ball is successfully.. basketed.


Le Pharmacy kids in action.

After some shuffling of roles and strategizing, they finally got the hang of it. Though I'm rather surprised nobody came up with the.. ingenius tactic of last year Pharmacy groups. ;)


Well, more or less there la.

One thing I love about Pick and Choose is how chaotic it can get. The moment the bell rings, balls flying everywhere, people running, tossing, screaming, cheering, jeering. :D Watching them play reminds me of my own session the year before. Retrievers stealing other team's balls as well as losing their own to others. Utter disorder. Mmhmm. :D The only setback was that we weren't quite as co-ordinated as we'd hope to be and I also kind of screwed up the number of times we were supposed to play and whatnot. Briefing was also.. meh.

Once that was done, it was onto the ice-breaking session. What they called the "New Found Friend Dance". Okay, maybe I was a bit.. off but I didn't take part in this and stood aside.

Nevertheless..


The other guides leading them on!

We walk to the left,
We walk to the right.

Once that was settled we moved on to what I would consider one of the most important activities of camp, designing a group flag and cheer.


P1, Aspirin! Their flag will be shown later. Funny how it bears some pretty striking similarities to mine the year before. Fate? or Irony? :O Hahah.

We were behind schedule at this point so everything felt so much more rushed. Our timetable was rather packed as well, which didn't help much. But after tea and an attempt to refresh ourselves, we all gathered at the field (every course, MBBS, Pharmacy, Psychology) for the evening telematch.


To the beach! Or not. T'was just a waiting station before we were all herded onto the nearby, and larger field, yet still just as hot. The respective group leaders were sent out and briefed by the staff on what the events were.


Who in turns briefs the rest of the team.


The games looked pretty interesting. There was one involving squashing a tennis ball between you and a teamates heads and running to a point and back. Probably one of the more entertaining ones to watch as everyone just seemed to lose all sense of direction, criss-crossing and bumping into each other.


But hands down, the coolest event was the "Water Volleyball". You play a 6v6 game with each team having 3 pairs holding up a cloth. You serve a water balloon using that cloth and hope to catch it if you were on the receiving end. It was close to impossible to catch a serve (till later on, where the groups just kept getting better) so I felt it was probably a lil lopsided. If you got first serve, you stand a much higher chance of winning. Shall dig up the videos I took later on. :D

Loved the group that did the drop shot serves. Can't remember which exactly but it was Pharmacy! Team PHARMACY :DD

A short break for dinner before the night session began.

Mei Yi and Weng presented for that slot on "So I'm going to be a Pharmacist". Frienddd, if you're reading this, I tell you ahhh. You have a knack for presenting la! Natural. :3

A short discussion later and the groups were to present on their flags.. So here we go.


Notice any similarities? This is P1's flag.


And P4, Pharm 4 Life. Sorry ah don't have pictures of P2 and P3 here with me =p

Then there was a short pep talk by Soo for us student guides. So concludes the first day of camp. Will write on the other 2 tomorrow!

On a side note, I downed 3 cups of coffee that night within 10 minutes. Trust me when I say it didn't end well. :/

Doodle #167 : A Return to Life's Conundrums

It's been too long hasn't it? Well my holidays have been.. A drab. So to speak. As with most of my other breaks from the usual hustle and bustle of life.

At long last, the semester is close to a new start. Year 2 of Pharmacy is here. None of us are involved with orientation week directly though, save a few volunteers (myself included). I figured it would be a better way to spend the final week of the holidays. Least it gave me a reason to drop by uni, and stuff to write about. ;)

So I got tasked with setting up the MUPhaS booth for the day, or least that's what I thought. Arrived at uni to run into a few familiar faces almost instantaneously. It's like a Pharmacy convention, somewhat. Ran off to grab a bite first, was starved! First time I woke up so early too. Well, Monash was alive again, ;)

For the volunteers, there were two stations we needed to help with. The registration booth at the foyer, and the MUPhaS booth at one of the tutorial rooms. So I hopped on over to Building 3 with Ah Boy Joshiee (ABJ) while the Powerpuff Girls handled registration. Someone commented how ours was the only booth that had student helpers. We pharmacists awesome la (or maybe we just lack staff).

So the two of us camped out at the Tutorial Room.. Waiting. We were told to ask Amie (a senior) or Esther for our tasks but nobody seemed to know when the booth was due to be set up. It seems that the people hired to do the job were.. MIA! So after some dawdling we all just rendezvoued at the registration booth. Skimmed the list and apparently we only have 41 juniors for this year (that's 10 less than my batch!) and only 5 guys :P Heh.

In short, we lazed about the entire morning. We had to wait till everybody on the list registered. All in all, only 38 people showed up. So we just waited.. For those last 3.. Until we got hungry and abandoned our booth! :D

Lunch was at pyramid. Somehow or rather, I ended up driving (at this point in time I'm no longer surprised at having to play driver at every corner). Thing was, I was driving the Civic. Bahh. Only driven it twice before. Blondiee was saying how she could puke from sitting in my car due to my bad driving. Ah, terasa d. :(

After a mee than filling lunch (feel the fats!), we headed back for the second session of the day. The pre camp preparation. Right, as part of a rather last minute conscription, ABJ and I got signed up for Student Guides for this year's Transition Camp! Including the two of us, there would be 8 guides in total for the camp, comprising of 6 Year 2 students and 2 from Year 3.

My feet still kind of hurt as I write this. I swear, my shoes are a size too small. Anyway, we had to bind the camp manuals. Including students, guides, and lecturers there were well of 50 booklets that need to be done.

Alas, we meet again Binding Machine! I had the pleasure of working with it once before, so I basically knew the working of it. Set up a system and began working :D until everyone decided to jump in. Maybe I made it look fun, lol. Felt like trying to crowd control a bunch of kids. Hahaha. Needed a break anyway, stood for almost 2 hours working on those manuals.

Did I mention how much my feet hurt? Or how guilty felt for eating so much?

Anyways, came home. Jogged. Ate more. Repeat tomorrow!

Just finished DotA. And so another day is passed.

*hits repeat button.