D Day: aka Orientation

It sure is pretty!  According to the Thai Government:  Chulalongkorn University ("Chula") is the oldest university in Thailand.  Regarded as the best and most selective university in Thailand, it has nineteen faculties and institutes.  It is named after King Chulalongkorn (Rama V), and was established by his son and successor King Vajiravudh (Rama VI).

Chulalongkorn University's
logo/emblem.  Undergrads are
required to wear uniforms and
they prominently display this.

I arrived at Chula bright and early Monday morning, to orient myself with the massive campus, and meet my classmates.  Orientation started off all cute and innocent – I woke up Monday morning with my biggest concerns being “I wonder if I should bring a backpack to school or a more fashionable messenger bag?…do I go hip, tech savvy laptop, or old school notebook?”…pretty innocent and in hindsight, absolutely irrelevant concerns.

Wow did I get a slap in the face.  The Dean welcomed us to Chula, and stated how challenging this program was – explaining that it was a two year Master’s program crammed into one full calendar year (12 months), and that it would be a very challenging time for us.  Then the Program Coordinator gets up and reiterates the same message.  She gave a few statistics for us to choke on – about how much reading there is, how many term papers, how we need to present our thesis at an international Conference and defend it in front of a panel of experts, etcetera etcetera etcetera (I will be using this phrase a lot thanks to Roger’s and Hammerstein ;).  I started to get a little more uncomfortable and shifted slightly in my seat.  Then she stated that last year, less than half the class COMPLETED THE PROGRAM. 

This is an aerial view of PART of campus - it is HUGE!

We then heard from several former students (several of which did not pass/finish) who explained how it was the most difficult year of their life, they had endless homework and advised not working or even travelling while doing this program because it is just too intense.  Wait, time out, what?  NO TRAVEL.    



Here I am in Thailand, I have been here almost two weeks – I have been to the Royal Palace, I have been to the beaches in Pattaya, I have seen my dream elephants, I am having a BLAST and I felt like I had all of my Asian dreams crushed right in that Conference Room in just one morning. 

One of the MANY libraries on campus - each faculty gets
their OWN library!

The bad news and intensity kept coming – we don’t get “breaks” in between semesters, we have FIVE classes each semester not including our thesis, which they continually advised us that the thesis work is extremely burdensome.  Our Research Methods professor got up and began explaining what constitutes field research, and how much was expected for our thesis.  When they mean field research here – they don’t mean going to the local Bangkok NGOs and asking for data and reports – they mean immersing yourself in the far North in a refugee camp or far South in a post-conflict zone, working on original data and research that is self-created.  Don’t get me wrong, it sounds incredibly exciting to do all of this, but it also sounds like a lot of work, and something I have never done before.

Carrying home my binder of reading materials for ONE CLASS of over 500 pages to prepare the following day and deciding I could cross weight lifting off my to do list because the thing weighed a ton, I was a little discouraged...