Week 1 Lecture: Orientation: Welcome to Life

How this course runs, what it's assessed on, and the honest baseline it starts from today

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Introduction#

A prior cohort’s anonymised exit surveys turn up the same handful of gaps every year: one student who learned laundry from a video the night before moving out, one who had never had to introduce themselves to a stranger, one who thought “adulting” was a joke until it wasn’t. Today is diagnostic only — nothing is taught yet, only baselined — because every topic this semester predicts things that matter well beyond university.

Definitions#

Baseline (noun)

a starting measurement against which later change is compared.

Cohort (noun)

the group of students undertaking this course together, for statistical and moral-support purposes.

Habit (noun)

a regular behaviour or routine done automatically, with little or no conscious thought.

Schedule (noun)

a plan listing activities and the specific times they happen.

Body#

• How lectures, labs, and reflections fit together. The lecture explains why a topic matters and what the research says; the lab that same week puts it into practice; the reflection due before the next lecture makes it personal and ongoing. Each piece does something the others don’t.

Check-in: If you only ever came to labs and skipped lectures, which part of this course would you be missing entirely?

• How the course is assessed. Five components: Weekly Reflections (15%), Assignment 1 — Makeover (15%), Assignment 2 — Touch Grass Field Study (20%), Assignment 3 — Time to Be an Adult (20%), Final Exam (30%). The archived past paper from 2026 is worth reading early — it’s the funniest artefact in the course.

Check-in: Which single assessment is worth the most of your final grade?

• Staff and policies, briefly. Submissions are paper-based, handed to the convenor’s office or a tutor, with email accepted only for extenuating circumstances. No laptops or screens in any lab, ever.

Check-in: Under what circumstance is emailing your submission actually allowed?

• Why these skills, and why now. Lally, P., van Jaarsveld, C. H. M., Potts, H. W. W., & Wardle, J. (2010) found habits take an average of 66 days to form, ranging from 18 to 254 — nowhere near the “just do it for a few days” most people expect. Duration alone doesn’t explain why some people get there and others quietly stop: Gollwitzer, P. M. (1999) found that rewording a vague goal into a specific if-then plan — not “I’ll shower more” but “when I get back from the gym, I will shower before I sit down” — roughly doubles the chance it actually happens. A real plan needs a time, not an intention.

Check-in: Show of hands — who's tried to build a new habit in under a week and given up? That's what this study explains.

• Your starting point. Before the self-assessment, look at your own desk: if its usable surface has quietly become a filing system for things you’ll deal with later, that’s not a character flaw, it’s just the first data point. The Week 1 lab runs the Starting Point Check — your honest self-assessment across the course’s five recurring topics: hygiene, dress, sleep, conversation, and money.

Check-in: Looking at your own desk right now, is its usable surface storage or workspace?

In-lecture activity#

Conclusion#

This course treats these skills as real, teachable, and assessed — and the lecture, lab, and reflection each do distinct, complementary work. Competence is a skill like any other; CS culture just never taught you this one. You now know how the course runs, how it’s assessed, its policies, and where you’re starting. Coming up: this week’s lab (Triage and the Starting Point Check).

This week’s reflection, due 12:00 Tuesday of week 2: name one habit you’re currently running unmonitored — something you do, or don’t do, that you’ve stopped noticing — and describe what it would take to pay attention to it properly for a week.