The following are a collection of articles written by NYU Shanghai freshmen students, about their first week of 8:15 am Chinese, the city of Shanghai (上海), and the dreaded, yet helpful, GPS Writing Workshop. From three different perspectives, here’s an insight into the first week of freshman year.I normally subscribe to the Calvin and Hobbes attitude toward school: I look upon it with a deep-seated mistrust. Lately, this belief system has been drowned out by an all-consuming culture of excellence. I cannot seem to rely upon the general apathy of my teachers. The students have lost that glassy-eyed look I was so familiar with. What’s worse is that I even saw some of them reading. What strange foreign land have I come to? My initial surprise this week has me dreadfully worried that I may need to rethink my lifelong attitude towards school.My first disillusionment surrounded the myth that college kids have mountains of free time. Hogwash. I cannot sleep past seven because someone, in a fit of bureaucratic spite I am sure, decided that 8:15 in the morning is an appropriate time to have Chinese class. This in itself is an affront to common decency, yet the transgressions go further. Not only do all the students show up for this pre-gloaming class, they are happy and cheerful to do so. So ingrained is their diligence that not even a dearth of sleep will keep them from excellence. Wankers. The next surprise was my introduction to the hellish Google calendars app. So far the only conceivable use I can find for it is making it painfully obvious that all my drinking time is actually reserved for class. What am I supposed to do with all the liquor in my fridge? (That’s the fridge on nine, for any RAs reading this.) I suppose I could probably just pour it off the balcony, though I have also considered getting rid of it in a massive booze-infused party. Everyone is invited! Room 1509 on Saturday, be there or be square. We will have pong, comfortable areas to spend the night, and we may even bring in some furniture too! But knowing you lot, I’m sure you’d rather study. So balcony it is.To cap it off, I can’t even be excited about the small amount of time I have outside of class. I finished GPS Workshop on Wednesday and thought it might be a good time to go explore the city with my new amigos - but when I looked for them they were nowhere to be found! I searched high and low, yet I could find neither hide nor hair. Until, much to the pain of my morals, I found them in the library. Words cannot describe my confusion. Such paltry free time and where is it squandered? In the library. Studying. This was the last proof I needed to know that this week was a truly worrisome harbinger of atrocities to come.The horrors of this week have lead me to expect from this school: students that actually appreciate studying, a schedule that demands responsibility and structure, and a dorm life focused on preserving a clean and healthy living environment. It would appear that I might have inadvertently wandered into an institution of higher academic learning. The byproducts of such a serious blunder have already made themselves known. I feel this strange feeling in the back of my head, which, if I didn’t know any better, I’d call a desire to learn something. Worse, my mouth can’t stop uttering strange phrases like, “Based upon my own close reading of the text, I believe that…” or, “I don’t think I can go to the club tonight, but I can go with you to the library.” However unprompted and unbidden, these phrases are playing increasingly larger roles in my common lexicon. Should I linger here much longer I may find myself transforming completely into the common species of vermin known as the university student. Already the sickness is spreading. I can feel it as I slowly black out under the increasing pressure of the rigorous academia known as a liberal arts education. The last message flashing in my head as the sickness pulls me under: Welcome to NYU Shanghai.

John Rhoades

I have long awaited my first week of classes at NYU Shanghai, and I can confidently state that it has lived up to my expectations. The classes were as rigorous as I anticipated, and some of them even more interesting than I could have hoped. Having been away from education for ten months, walking into a Global Perspectives on Society lecture was genuinely scary. I feared that the subject matter of GPS would be indigestible intellectual jargon, but instead found it to be exceptionally relevant to us as young people and to NYU Shanghai as an institution founded upon globalization. Each of my professors has been outstanding thus far and I am yet to leave a lecture feeling like I've wasted my time. Last night I had my first Traditional Chinese Wisdom lecture, and the conversation about the subject matter lasted out of the classroom, to the family mart, through a beer, and onto the train.Having an 8:15 AM Chinese course has been brutal, but the benefits of speaking Chinese surpass just utilitarian gains: it allows us to have a great time here in China. As a student who came to NYU Shanghai partially to study Chinese, I have taken any opportunity this week to chat up taxi drivers, restaurant patrons and anyone (un)lucky enough to cross paths with me. What is genuinely frustrating about the school is the lack of proximity between the academic building and the dormitories, and the location of the dorms in general. Jinqiao is lovely, but I already have had the misfortune of running into severely inebriated Chinese gangsters (who were not happy to see foreigners) whilst trying to enjoy some late night street food, and it costs a minor fortune to come back from Puxi when the trains stop running.Despite my frustration with the location of the dorms, the NYU Shanghai community, both official and unofficial, has been more than cordial, offering school sanctioned extracurricular activities nearly everyday, and various cultural and nightlife opportunities every night. Between classes and exploring Shanghai, I have had an extremely fulfilling first academic week at NYU Shanghai.

Sohrob Moslehi

Finally, I am here. I started the first week at NYU Shanghai with a mixture of anxiety and excitement. For a local resident from the Puxi Area, Pudong is a brand new place for me. The Orientation Week was far more interesting - as well as exhausting - than I had expected. I thought it would be a week of serious lectures and performances by school leaders and alumni, but it turned out to be a full and exciting week packed with fun activities and events of all kinds. It is still hard to believe that I completed a medical check, two lectures, a meeting with my advisor, a three hours-long rehearsal, half an hour of plaza dancing and three hours of chatting in the dorm in the span of one day during Orientation Week. Honestly speaking, this week was as intense as the Candidate Weekend, which is designed as a competition between all the students. I was amazed at how interesting the complicated Greek tragedy Antigone was after the GPS lecture, how excellent all the shows at ‘SH’MASH’ were, how many other languages I heard in a single day, and how various the backgrounds of all the students here are. I still clearly remember several highlights from orientation week. Saturday was a long day. Students were dressed up professionally in the on-campus job fair, carrying sheets of resumes from noon to three in the afternoon. Later we changed into our outfits and gave our orientation group performance in the afternoon. When nighttime came, we all dressed up in the sparkling and luxurious 1920s style and attended the Jazz Night. It truly was fancy.Academically, I plan to re-evaluate my interests and explore more fields after taking introductory liberal arts classes. I hope to experiment with a challenging and fresh field - such as mathematics - in the coming semester. I feel warm and comfortable in the library, which I take as a good sign that I will have a nice academic life here. Though the university life is far more diverse and stressful than my fellow students in traditional Chinese universities, I plan to fully embrace my college life here at NYU Shanghai.

Jasmine Zhu

This article was written by a collection of NYU Shanghai freshmen . Send an email to [email protected] to get in touch. Photo Credit: Mei Wu