It has now been three days since I made the post about the General Orientation, and much like it, I don’t remember much about the Academic Orientation; in fact, I think I remember even less about this one.
The Academic Orientation, complementing the General Orientation, is a way for Binus to teach us about the things we’ll be studying in college; in the same way that certain species of birds teach their young how to fly by pushing them off the nest and into freefall. Not three days into the orientation and the professors have already told us to make, and I emphasise that, MAKE a board/card game. As in, not only do you have to design an entirely original game, you have to produce everything from the art, the pieces, the cards, the instruction booklet, the box, and a piece of our stressed-out nearly-suicidal spirit to put in every box. I mean seriously, professors; this is a bit much for a group of 4 freshmen, isn’t it? I mean, I barely know how college functions and you already throw what equals to a job but with no pay onto me. And some of these people don’t even have 4 members, so they have to work harder, still with no pay. “We’ll pay you in grades”–don’t give me that; I can’t use grades to buy the expensive necessities of college like, for example, the production costs of this game. And how much time do we have to do all of this? Until the end of November? That’s how long it took to make E.T. for the Atari, and you can see how well that turned out. Though, to be fair, making a video game back then was as easy as rock-climbing with both of your legs cut off.
Back to the actual orientation, then. I honestly don’t remember anything else about it aside from the test we had on the last day, so I guess I’ll just write about that. The test was divided into two parts, an essay and a programming test. The programming test was fairly simple; they give you an example of the program they want you to make, you make the program they want you to make. But they have to give you more of a challenge than that, so they forbid you from using getchar(), forcing you to find another way to not have the program close after doing what you want it to do. The essay test had only two items: number one asked you to explain what game balancing is, and number two asked you to explain the entire history of video game consoles, upon reading which my eye started twitching and I stared disgustedly at the professors. So on top of having to come up with programs you also have to write a book, all within 100 minutes, because the GAT department are elitists who have nothing but disdain for anyone not acquainted with obscure gaming consoles like the Magnavox Odyssey. And yes, I had to Google what the oldest gaming console is.
Alright, that’s all I have to write about the Academic Orientation; and it only took me two hours with bouts of lounging around on Youtube, each of which lasts about half an hour.