Floor Gathering

A team of four Resident Tutors, newly appointed in the academic year 2014–15, welcomed students in a casual after-dinner gathering in the pantries of the College hostel on 25 September 2014.  Highlights of the night included chit-chatting, tabletop games, card games, and selfies – not to mention snacks and drinks!  Participating residents and resident tutors broke the ice and mingle in a lighthearted setup.

Korean Night

A group of Korean students of CW Chu College organized a Korean Night on 11 November 2014.  Surrounded by authentic Korean food, students learnt Korean expressions and watched two live performances – a K-pop song by Ms Chan Hei Chi (local) and Ms Cha Min Ji (Korean), former champions in the CUHK Singing Contest (group category), and a K-pop dance by Soul-Sight-Seek, a dance team under the Korean Student Association of CUHK.  To further immerse themselves in Korean culture, participants watched a romantic comedy, 200 Pounds Beauty, before calling it a night.

Hotpot Buffet  

To reach out to residents and establish good rapport with them, the College resident tutors organized a hotpot buffet at the Benjamin Franklin Centre Staff Canteen on 17 November 2014.  Residents joined in the feast and recharged their batteries before the wave of exams.  Many incoming exchange students experienced authentic Chinese hotpot for the first time in their lives – don't forget to cook it!

Vice-Chancellor's Cup Tournament & Fun Fair 2014

Morningside College, S.H. Ho College and CW Chu College joined hands to form the 'MSC' team and participated in various ball games in the Vice-Chancellor's Cup (VC's Cup) held in November 2014.

On the day of the finals, teachers and staff joined colleagues from other Colleges in the Opening Ceremony and enjoyed a lively lion dance performance.  The lion soon took the audience to the nearby Fun Fair and enlivened the whole venue.  The College hosted a game booth for the Fun Fair that featured a miniature soccer goal, which attracted staff members, guests, adults and children alike to score and receive jelly candy as a prize.

Athletes and supporting staff celebrated their hard work at a Post-Tournament Dinner on 2 December.

Butterflies Watching and Hiking at Shing Mun

Autumn's approach began the favourite hiking season in Hong Kong. College teacher Prof Amos Tai from the Earth System Science Programme, together with his friend Mr Yiu Vor, organized a hiking and butterfly watching activity at Shing Mun for College students on 1 November 2014. Mr Yiu Vor is the Chairman of the Hong Kong Entomological Society and a butterfly specialist. Guided by Mr Yiu, 21 College students spent a relaxing afternoon for a nice walk along Pineapple Dam Nature Education Trail and a visit to the butterfly gardens at Shing Mun Reservoir, learning about butterflies in Hong Kong and understanding more about their diversity and ecology.

The Pineapple Dam Nature Education Trail and the butterfly gardens at Shing Mun Reservoir are good places for butterfly watching, with a large variety of plants, including food plants and nectar plants which are common foods for butterflies and their larvae. It is a habitat for 152 recorded species of butterflies,  accounting for 60% of all known species in Hong Kong.

During the hike, Mr Yiu taught students how to identify butterflies from their features:  size, wing colours, flying pattern and behaviour. Though butterflies differ widely across species, there are some field marks for quick identification. For instance, flight pattern is a characteristic for identification: Swallowtails (Papilionidae) and Whites and Yellows (Pieridae) fly fast while Tigers and Crows (Danaidae) flutter slowly and often glide. Besides, Mr Yiu shared tips for photographing butterflies — they are sensitive, and need to be approached slowly and with patience.   Through this half-day tour, students enriched their knowledge on butterflies.

Workshop on Creativity and Introduction of the Julie Yu Scholarship

The College held a Workshop on Creativity on 29 January 2015 to explore the concept of creativity with students, and to introduce The Professor Julie Hung Hsua Yu Scholarship for Intellectual Excel-leration ('Julie Yu Scholarship' for short).  This  college scholarship was established through the generous donation of a former student of our college teacher, Professor Julie Yu, in honour of her dedication to teaching.  The scholarship invites applicants to propose creative projects, which ties in with the theme of the workshop.

The College was honoured to have Mr Bernard Suen, Project Director of the Center  for Entrepreneurship in CUHK, and Director of Creativity Lab of Wu Yee Sun College, as our guest speaker.  Through videos and graphics, students learnt the 'SCAMPER' method, which stands for 7 ways to apply the concept of creativity, namely, to substitute, combine, adapt, modify, put to other use, eliminate, and reverse — each representing a new possibility to transform a product creatively.  Tired of the traditional Smarties candy?  Reverse it to turn the chocolate inside-out for a Smarties chocolate bar!  Students then formed small groups to try putting theory into practice — to explore alternate functions of a vending machine!  One student proposed to have the machine selling concealed product, such as the famous Kinder Surprise egg.

Sharing by Ms Young Mei Ling

The College invited Ms Young Mei Ling, a CUHK alumna, to deliver a talk to College students on 6 January 2015. Graduated from CUHK as an Anthropology major in 2014, Mei Ling won the prestigious the Esther Yewpick Lee Millennium Scholarship in 2014 for postgraduate studies at University of Oxford. She is now studying for an M.Phil in International Relations.

Mei Ling shared with the audience her intellectual pursuit — from CUHK to Oxford, her course of growing up in two cultures, as well as her insight and experience in scholarship application. All these broadened our students' horizon, in terms of not only university learning but also their postgraduate study and career planning for the future.