Torkin Strine

UNSW has a huge international student population, and with that they have a program call Student Development International (SDI). SDI is there to make sure international students are taken care of. They help with everything an international student could need help with; arriving, accommodations, getting to know the campus and city, visa conditions, etc. From now until school starts SDI has a bunch of workshops planned for those of us who just arrived and will be starting school this semester.

I went to one of these workshops today which was titled, “Arrival Briefings.” The description of the course told me I would learn the essentials of living and learning in a new environment. I don’t know if I would exactly say I learned the essentials about living and learning in a new environment, but it was entertaining nonetheless.

The workshop went through a lot of the stuff I have already done and most of us sitting in that room should have already done. Things like make sure we had overseas health insurance, enroll in class, get a student ID, etc. The workshop did go through some interesting things like campus and beach safety. I think the beach safety video scared everyone away from ever entering the water, especially when the guy heading the workshop made the statement, “about 2-3 International students die each year from drowning in the ocean.” At that point everyone looked around the room and thought, “Who will die this year? Will it be you? Or you?”

There was an upside to this workshop. Towards the end of the seminar we came to the part about Australian language. First the guy handed out a page titled, “A lesson in Strine.” According to Wikipedia, Strine is ‘used to describe a joke or made-up "language" purportedly spoken by Australians whose accents frequently run words together in a type of liaison’. Anyway, on this sheet of paper were Aussie words and their English equivalent next to them. This wasn’t even the best part. Along with going down the list of words and having us repeat them. The guy then put this video on.

Torkin Strine

**This is not a joke! ** The guy in the workshop for real played this video. I was dying because I wanted to laugh so hard, especially when everyone sitting around me was repeating the words back to it. Clearly this workshop was for international students who come from another county where English is not their first language. I’m glad I went, and I hope that all the workshops are as good as or better than this one was! G’day!!