Hi HKU!

I arrived in Hong Kong two weeks ago and have settled in already.  I was assigned to live at the brand new HKU dorms called the Residential Colleges on Lung Wah Street.  However, when I arrived at the Residential Colleges, they told me that I would be placed into a hotel for a few days because the air quality did not pass the government standards.  I thought they had already taken care of that because they emailed me before I left the U.S. saying that I would be able to move straight into the Residential Colleges.  HKU prepared shuttle buses and took us to Ibis Hotel, which was pretty nice and new.  So I stayed there for three days before I moved back.  I was assigned to a double on Floor 13.  It’s a corner room so it’s actually bigger than what I expected.  My floor is an all female floor with many international and exchange students and a few locals.  It definitely feels different from my co-ed floor that I was used to at UC Berkeley.  My floor is very international with students from the U.S., Europe, Korea, Indonesia, mainland China, and Hong Kong. There is a small lounge with a TV, refrigerator, and kitchen.  There is also a laundry room at the very top floor of the building (Floor 29). 

After moving in, I went to campus and checked in at the Global Lounge where they gave me a packet of information, and then I checked in at the Faculty of Arts office, which was the faculty that I was admitted into.  I turned in a student ID card form to my faculty and also picked up a student octopus card form from the faculty office.  The student octopus card gives us discounts when taking the MTR.  However, the card won’t be available until November, so I will have to get a temporary one for now.

Exchange students can only sign up for courses during the two week add/drop period, starting at 12pm on the very first day of class.  HKU’s course enrollment process was very frustrating to me.  I am required to take 5 courses and 3 have to be from the Faculty of Arts.  In UC Berkeley, we use Telebears to enroll in courses, which I learned to love now that I experienced HKU’s system. At UCB, once we enroll into a course, we are officially enrolled.  However, at HKU, when we enroll into a course, there is a pending and approval process.  All the courses that I added will have a pending status until they get approved.  What I didn’t like was that they would randomly disapprove my courses and drop me from them during this period.  This was a somewhat stressful time because I got disapproved for 4 out of my 5 courses.  Even after I signed up for a Common Core class which the professor said had 6 more seats left on the first day, I got dropped when other students signed up for it because it seems that exchange students have the lowest priority here. For my foreign language course, I added it on the very first day of class.  My full-time friend here added it a few days after me, but she got approved and I’m still pending.  I even talked to the professors here, but they said that they cannot do anything about it because they cannot manually add students in.  A local student told me to just keep trying and that’s what I did.  I finally got approved for 4 courses after getting rejected many times and am still waiting for the last course.  Exchange students who are in different faculties already got some of their courses approved before they came.  Exchange students I met who were also admitted into the Faculty of Arts didn’t get any courses approved beforehand, so maybe it was just my faculty.  Hopefully, I’ll get approved for my 5^th course.