Anticipated Serendipity II: A Chapter of My Life, Part 2

Living in on-campus housing (they call it residence halls) at UB was an interesting experience. I was fortunate enough to be able to experience this for one semester before I moved off-campus (on-campus housing is pretty costly!).

Just a quick background... UB has 2 campuses, the North and the South campus. The North Campus is where the core academic programs are offered, and it's located in suburban Amherst. My faculty - School of Management - is here. The South Campus is closer to downtown Buffalo and houses the Schools of Architecture and Planning, Medicine and Biomedical Sciences, Dental Medicine, Public Health and Health Professions, and Nursing. The Student Health Center is also in the South. They have buses running regularly to and from each campus so getting from one campus to the other was not a problem. The only problem I had was when I was down with a bug and could hardly move and I had to drag myself out of my room and catch the bus to the Health Center.

Naturally, since my faculty was in the North campus, I applied to housing there. I was assigned to Richmond Hall, which is in the Joseph Ellicott Complex. I was in quad i.e. 4 people sharing a room. This was when I learnt never to trust brochures coz they made the living conditions seem sooooo nice in the brochure but when I got there, I discovered that it was just a squarish room, with a bed and desk in each corner. But that aside, it was an interesting one-semester experience, nonetheless.

My roommates were 2 Americans and a Puerto Rican. The Americans were Julie and Elizabeth (Liz, for short). I can't remember the Puerto Rican's name coz she was hardly in the room (she was usually at the boyfriend's place). I remember watching Jerry Springer and Ricki Lake on her TV though, hehe. Julie was in the rowing team so she was usually up early for practice. There was an incident where during the winter, she slipped on ice and hit her head quite hard. She was relating the story of when she went to the doctor to get it checked, the doctor told her to get some rest and get her roommate to wake her up at regular intervals to "make sure she was easily aroused"... haha... ;-)

Here's how the room looked like... of course, this one has been decorated and furnished quite elaborately...

Pantry, where we cooked our late-nite Maggi mee... ;-)

*Pics above courtesy of the UB website (dunno why I didn't take any pics)

View of the lake and lecture halls (right at the far end) from the residence halls...

Mr. Steven Shaw, Director of International Admissions. This was at one of the M'sian Student Association (MASA) events. He ran the UB program at Stamford College, PJ and went back to UB when it was terminated in end '98. That was just before we all left for UB (Jan '99). Wow, it feels like ages ago! I am ancient! *sob sob*

Another MASA event

We got people to write their names in Chinese characters. There's mine, hehe...