ITSC, like other units in the CUHK, has been working long and hard in preparing for the intake of the double cohort in coming Sep. While Sep officially brings us the new school year, the peak time of CU Link Card Centre already started in August - more than 6,500 CU Link cards have been being issued to freshmen in two batches, one for students admitted under the old curriculum and one for those admitted under the "3+3+4" curriculum.

At the time our freshmen accept the offer and their records are created in CUSIS, our Card Centre staff is also getting ready for card issuing process.

Firstly, our staff retrieves new students' data from CUSIS and makes the data available in a card printer for further process.

Office of the CU Link Card Centre	Card Centre staff working hard on card issuance

Then, a raw CU Link card is inserted into the card printer. By then the chips embedded on the smart card carry no data. The next thing to do is application loading – printer encodes and loads a student's data into the chips, so that the card carries useful data for one accessing various University services and facilities.

After that, the card moves along a miniature conveyor belt to get printed with the  student's information, including name, student ID, photo, programme admitted, college and expiry date, on its surface. The card is then laminated with a protective coating and output from the printer.

A raw CU Link	The card printer serves for application loading, printing and protective coat laminating	A printed CU Link carrying useful data

Finally, our staff goes through a quality inspection and information verification for all the printed cards before they are sorted and made ready for distribution on the CU Link Card Days.

Final checking on the printed CU Link	Card sorting in progress

So far about 3,500 new students had collected their CU Link cards in the first batch of card distribution on 17 Aug, and the other 3,000+ new students would collect their cards on 3 Sep.