Proper recount!
Day 1:
I went with a friend who is in the same course, so it meant I had no awkward situations as I had someone to fall back on
Took 1-1.5 hours to get there. Once we got there the boys put all their things in the "cabins" (AKA tin sheds housing 30 people per shed). The girls got their stuff shipped away. I suppose it was good organisation to leave at least 1km between boys/girls. Anyhow, the boys cabin was at least a 10min walk back to the site which turned out to be fairly shit :/
We got into the main hall, they introduced themselves, blah, blah. We got sorted into 7 or 8 groups of 10-13 people. You stick with this group for the rest of the trip for those who haven't gone. We played some lame "getting to know you" games. They got fairly boring, lucky we had dinner next. Meal times were cool, there was a decent variety, plus we got very regular meals + snacks something I've been missing these holidays. After dinner there was this "fashion parade" activity. Basically had to dress up 2 people from your group in a range of things given to you. The main item was newspaper. The rest was sticky tape, coloured paper, crepe paper, and some ribbon. I thought our's was awesome, but no :/ We got shit scores for our's. Anyway this actually wasn't as lame as it sounded. We got a decent amount of time and everyone got into making us look like idiots. I was the bride, and the girl in my group was the groom. We made it really gender specific. I ended up with big boobs made out of balloons under my flowing wedding dress with a veil (Y). She had facial hair and a tie as well as a suit. So, that was a real icebreaker. After all that it was a little bit of free time and off to bed.
Day 2
This was filled with engineering activities which was gay. First was one was pretty fun. "Toxic swamp". It had a lot of teamwork. A lot of things can go wrong which makes it hilarious as you have to start again. The whole "meet n greet" aspect was starting to work well and people weren't being awkward like I'd imagined all IT/Eng people to be. You had to stand on these two wooden planks that acted like skis, but you had to coordinate it so the 4 people on them could all lift up their left/right leg at the same time so you could move forward. Anyway we had to get over said "swamp" and then build a device to catch something in a "pond" and then build something to drop a ball in the pond.
We had shocking electricity, that was shit, it was wiring an electric cable to work as an extension cord, this only took like 15 minutes though and then we spent like 45 minutes listening to a boring lecture :/ Wasn't really IT related. Just some IT chump bagging out engineers.
Forgot the name of the 3rd one. It was real interesting if we knew what to do though. We had materials to "buy". We got given a budget. We had to build a catapult to throw a golf ball. The equation took into account money spent/saved so it was cool because it meant that if you got 5metres in distance you could beat the team that got 10 metres. Anyway, my team was shit at it, yay.
Then we had some lectures and some more orientation. It's useful if you're not proactive. I'd pretty much looked up all this information before. So it was rather tedious sitting there. You got some personal recounts. We got 3 or so guest speakers speaking about their jobs in IT which was semi-interesting.
That night was trivia and bar night. Trivia was lots of fun, its self explanatory. We got fucking gypped. One of our rounds plus our bonus round got ripped up for being 0.5 seconds too slow to hand it in. Afterwards it was a dance thing. They turned off the lights in the big shed and "Dj'd" some music. Music was rather horrible. Surprisingly there were like 30 people dancing, haha.
Afterwards people went to the dining area and played poker and other card games. There's no strict bedtime, just a "wake up now" time. So People were up after 2 am and got woken up at 7am by an airhorn.. Oh how I want to kill those engineering bastards.
Day 3
Dome building + humpty dumpty. Dome building was building a structure out of just newspaper and tape to be self supporting and to be able to fit the whole group under it. That was heaps fun. 4 groups at a time and yeah, interesting to see what people tried. Every group failed but ours held up the longest (like 30 seconds).
Humpty dumpty was building an enclosure for an unboiled egg to drop from 2 storey roof. We had 50 straws and 2metres of masking tape. That was shit because the engineers were heaps biased and chucking them around.
Then there was the auction. They gave away some shirts, some vouchers and odd bits and pieces.
Overall, it was good social networking. Made a few friends, which I thought wasn't going to happen because everyone would suck, but they didn't. All of a sudden it makes going into uni a lot easier as you just know what everyone's like. You don't need to walk in and suss out people. Meetngreet before we started was a good idea. In terms of learning, I'd say it's pretty useless. In terms of fun, it wasn't too bad, in terms of making friends and sharing a mutual hate for others, it was excellent.
Should definitely go for a bit longer as there was only 1 full day.