TL;DR
Before summer camp starts planning, they recruit a round of people. They’ll tell you: “The camp won’t take up too much of your time, and won’t affect your studies. About six hours per week. It won’t be too exhausting…” But once you’re in, you’ll find the reality is nowhere near what they promised during recruitment. The promised 6 hours becomes 12 hours, eventually becoming 12+ hours. Moreover, practice sessions start at night and can go until one or two in the morning.
Snake Dance
Basically a acrobatics performance. No dance background needed—it’s all physical work, requiring minimal musical talent (at least being able to hear the beat). Duration is about 5 minutes. Since it’s acrobatics and everyone’s just regular people, injuries from falls and exhaustion are very common during practice. The difficulty is high and requires everyone’s coordination. This is the most time-consuming activity. Basically it’s extremely exhausting—my stamina would give out before finishing.
Team Games
These practice sessions often start at midnight. Starting at midnight itself is weird—how are you supposed to attend classes the next day without proper sleep? I once took leave because my body wasn’t feeling well from the snake dance, and someone still murmured about it, just because the guitar club’s performance was the next day. That’s how the department ecology works.
Art Day
I only learned about this at the staff meeting. There’s no advance notice about how much art work you’ll do based on your group choice—shouldn’t that be a consideration when choosing groups? And before officially joining, there’s no briefing explaining each group’s work and time commitment. The only information I received was during Linear Algebra class, when the head coordinator suddenly told me: “It’ll probably only take six hours per week, not too exhausting. I think you can do it.” That’s all the information I had before joining.
Props
Art day means lots of crafts, but mainly RPG props. There are tons of them—about 100+ pieces—and any mistakes mean starting over. Those props are small cards used for checkpoint challenges. The art team designs the patterns first, prints them out, uses one copy as a template for coloring, and everyone else paints following the exact colors. They need to be identical—visually indistinguishable at least. After coloring, you cut out the pattern, remove the black borders, and glue them onto 9x9 cardstock. All that cardstock has to be cut from individual A4 sheets into 9x9 grids, then after gluing, hand-laminated with tape. So much work is manual—if any step goes wrong, that card is ruined and must be redone. This went on for about three weeks. Why “about”? Because I stopped going after that.
All this hassle could actually be done with printing. When the guitar club laminated name tags for 30+ people, laminating only cost 160 bucks. Refusing to use machines just means everyone serves time together.
Prison Sessions
One session is 105 minutes. Depending on your group and activities, the number of sessions you need to fill per week varies:
- Female camp counselors, RPG: 4
- Everyone else: 3
- Male camp counselors, Art team: no sessions required
See it now! It’s a prison sentence! Time commitment, excluding art and male camp counselors, is at least +5 hrs/week
Name Tags
Currently designed by the art team, made by the art team. There’s nothing wrong with the art team designing them, since those who can’t do art simply can’t design. But name tags need to be handcrafted after design, and after the event, those things are either already gray or sitting somewhere gathering dust. Handmaking those hard-to-cut, hard-to-glue designs is really unnecessary. Printing and laminating is more practical and won’t make everyone so exhausted.
Staff Fee
This was only formally disclosed when I was preparing to quit. This is very wrong. The fact that there’s a staff fee should be clearly explained before joining, not when someone is about to leave. The old man Zhou told me it’s about 2000 per person. If I wasn’t leaving, would I only be informed about the staff fee after the camp ended? It’s fine to charge, but it should be clearly explained before joining—this is a major consideration for whether to join or not. Fees shouldn’t be collected only when someone quits or after the event.
Also, this camp activity has no recruitment briefing—just a staff meeting after adding people to divide responsibilities. All information is only learned through actual practice. Of course, review dates are announced in advance, but not the times! Meaning you need to keep your entire day free for it—this is also unreasonable.
Anyway, camp is full of these kinds of unreasonable situations, so I quit recently. I’m still in the process of coordinating with the head coordinator, but I’m definitely leaving. But if you’re a freshman, go ahead and join—the camp itself is actually pretty fun.