Make a friend, make them cry

Something I care deeply about. RMIT spends millions of dollars in marketing to attract international students to come and study in Australia. The incentive is obvious: They pay up front, at higher prices and most importantly they fail and fail often. I never realised this, I always thought those nerdy Asian kids were the ones who became dux, the ones pressured by their parents to be brighter than bright and whiter than white (piano, violin, tennis you know shit my parents didn’t even bother with in my expensive education) my assumption was far wrong.
In second year I treated uni with almost as much contempt as I had VCE. First year had been a holiday I hadn’t even touched my textbooks and seemed to be a key contributor in my course. I had recently been dumped so I fled to Japan with my tail between my legs desperately seeking someplace where I was free from reminders of the decline even though I’d met a great girl in the interim. Life was in fact on the up and up. I was an o-weeker for my college which was affiliated to Melbourne Uni which being more prestigious means you have to spend less time attending it than RMIT so my first week of second year classes was a writeoff because I was to spend it drunk leading around a pack of impressionable freshers trying to convince them I was cooler than they were.
I also didn’t bother enrolling in any classes. So when I slept through the following Monday and Tuesday and finally got up on the Wednesday to schedule all my classes for the last two days of the week I was shocked to discover I couldn’t. So I missed my second week. My third week was spent turning up to classes that had been filled by disregarding the online booking. So in week four I was put into a class with the other students who were too disorganised to form a group. They were fucking insane.
Nevertheless as marketing is pretty much all group assignments I failed two subjects and lost a lot of sleep.
I vowed that from now on I would A) attend all classes (or at the very least the first and last ones) B) Accept late comers into my group to spare them from eachother 3) Never trust anyone to compile the final assignment again.
The plan worked brilliantly. I ended up in a group with 5 mainland chinese students who could barely speak English, had no grasp of basic marketing concepts, didn’t have the confidence to do a class presentation and scared off the only other local student in my group. For the first time ever we got a HD for a group assignment. I barely lifted a finger too. It was time consuming but these guys were reliable, we had synergy and the shoddiness of my group appealed to my ‘I’ll fucking show them’ response which is my greatest motivator.
Local students are excitable, arrogant and have a distorted perspective of their own ability in marketing. Too many cooks. They are also disorganised procrastinators or worse sycophants with bleached teeth. As such group assignments translates into one person doing 5-6 assignments while the others ride free.
I’ve worked with my Chinese group ever since. The amount Andy, Jerry and Xi developed as people and professionals was remarkable. Easily the most rewarding thing I’ve done at Uni and we remain friends even now that they’ve graduated. Jerry and I have plans to tap into the lucrative BEM that is China, as a hobby. Andy and Jerry have cooked for me when I’ve felt down and says classic stuff like ‘Australian pork stinks because you are too kind to your animals. Need to cut throat and bleed, all the blood goes no more stink’ and ‘look after your penis’ just classic stuff. Through the relationship they’ve learned that China had a Tianamin square massacre they never knew about and that Tibet is considered an occupied country rather than a part of China.
I was so heartbroken when they graduated I decided I needed to do something about it and eventually got in touch with Marc Barry (an amazing man in his own right) who runs activities for RMIT English Worldwide or REW through which I now run a cycling club for international students on weekends and have met some interesting people. I’m also looking at starting up a basketball club since the guy running it could no longer spare the time and its much easier and more accessable than the cycling club.
Anyone who wants to broaden themselves and really make a world of difference to an international student or two and at the same time get fit, make friends and broaden your understanding of the world I strongly urge you to get in touch with Marc at REW marc.barry@rmit.edu.au all you need is an interest and to include an international student in it. Marc introduces me to everyone and 1 or 10 people don’t really matter. Melbourne CBD can be an alienating place if your whole life is shopping at QV, living at QV and sitting through lectures of gobbledegook. It’s something I’m pretty involved in and it’s easy, its like hugging myself.