President's Barbecue Fall '08

Posted at 11:20 AM, Monday, August 25, 2008

I had a fabulous time! Tastey food and lovely people with fantastic speeches..... I enjoyed every bit of it. The event started with my good friend Judith's speech - she spoke about her experience as an abroad at AU exchange student, and when she mentioned that she actually shook Obama's hand there was a huge round of applause! The deans of each school (Dean Kah - SITC, Dean Smith - SBE, and Dean Laawal - SAS) and the DSA (Director of Student Affairs) gave a speech, as well as the SUG (Student Union Govt.) president Soji. Dr. Garofalo and President Smith also spoke at the barbecue. I loved Dr. Garofalo's speech best, but the others were just as wonderful. In any case, the food served after the speech was superb! We had chicken, rice, vegetable and fruit salad, and cake, with soft drinks. The quality of the food was really good. Hmm, I guess President Smith was somewhat correct in saying he was standing between us and the barbecue (in his speech) haha....just joking, actually I liked the speeches so much that I didn't even remember the food Thank God Hamman got to take pictures for me to post . I also gave an interview after the event not knowing which channel it was for. I found out after the interview that it was for  AIT! I hope my interview wasn't too bad cos I didn't really think while answering questions  Actually they intended to interview Judith, but they asked me to join the interview. It was cool actually .......

Elijah and Damian in the left photo & Judith giving her speech in the photo on the right

I feel that becasue of the presence of soo many new people and of course better planning, this orientation has been the best so far. The only hitch was that a lizard ended up in the Admissions check-in room! Haha! Mr. Edwin (one of the Admissions staff and a good friend) said that the poor thing had only come to register! It was really funny..... all the staff at admissions, and in fact, AUN is just soo friendly and funny. I'm having a great time, thank God! Another thing that I really liked about this orientation was that the Finance department got rid of some of the manual process - we (me and my siblings) developed a Finance Module for the Finance department to computerize some of their student records. You know, I just love to see automated and improved processes  I only pray registration is just as smooth. There will be some improvements in registration as well, but that's supposed to be a surprise so I can't mention it right now. At any rate, I sincerely thank Lord Jesus for everything.

I will talk about faculty and staff that left us this semester, and new ones arrived in one of my later entries. There's a whole lot of new faculty and staff that has arrived. And we have 2 exchange students from AU, Washington, and 2 visiting students. This semester looks promising......