After working as a camp worker, I just want to tell you — don’t be fooled into joining. Think twice before you sign up.

TL;DR

Before the camp preparations start, they’ll first recruit people. They’ll tell you things like: “Camp won’t take much of your time. You’ll still have time for schoolwork. Maybe six hours a week. It’s not tiring at all…” But once you’re in, you’ll realize that the truth is nowhere near what they said. Those “six hours” quickly turn into twelve, and eventually twelve at minimum. Practice sessions usually start at night and can go until one or two in the morning.

Snake Dance

Basically, it’s a stunt performance — you don’t need any dance background, but it’s all physical work and requires at least a little sense of rhythm (as in, knowing the beat). It usually lasts around five minutes. Because it involves stunts and none of us are professionals, it’s really easy to fall, get injured, or just burn out during practice. This one takes the most time to rehearse and requires perfect coordination among everyone. It’s exhausting — with my stamina, I might collapse before the dance even ends.

Group Games

This one often starts at midnight, which is insane. How are you supposed to attend class the next day without sleep? Once, I took a day off from practice because I wasn’t feeling well from the snake dance, and people still murmured about it — just because the next day happened to be the Guitar Club’s performance day. That’s just how weird the department’s culture is.

Art Day

I only found out about this during the workers’ general meeting. No one said beforehand how much art-related work each group had to do — which really should’ve been a deciding factor when choosing your team. And before officially joining, there was no orientation or explanation about what each group’s responsibilities were, or how much time they’d take.

The only information I got was when the general leader approached me after Linear Algebra class and said:
“It only takes about six hours a week, not too tiring. I think you can handle it.” That was literally all I knew before joining.

Props

Art Day basically means endless arts and crafts — mostly for RPG props. There are over a hundred of them, and if one is messed up, you have to redo it. These props are small cards used for mini-games during the camp.

The art team first designs the patterns, prints them, uses one copy as a color reference, and the others have to be colored exactly the same — at least close enough that you can’t tell the difference by eye. After coloring, you cut out the designs, trim off the black borders, and glue them onto 9x9 cm cardstock.
Each A4 sheet has to be measured, marked, and cut into 9x9 squares by hand. Then everything is laminated manually with tape. If you mess up any step, that card is trash, and you start over. This whole process lasted about three weeks — or so I think, since I stopped going later on.

Honestly, all this could’ve been printed. When our Guitar Club laminated over 30 name tags, the total cost was only 160 NTD. Doing everything by hand just means everyone sits in “craft jail.”

The “Jail” Schedule

Each session lasts 105 minutes, and depending on your group and activity, you have to sign up for different numbers of sessions per week:

• Female counselors, RPG: 4 sessions
• Others: 3 sessions
• Male counselors, Art team: none

See the problem? It’s literally a “jail schedule.” Except for the art team and male counselors, everyone loses at least +5 hours/week.

Name Tags

Currently, the art team designs and makes them. Designing isn’t a problem — if you’re not good at art, you simply can’t design. But making them by hand is a nightmare. After the event, those name tags either turned gray or are collecting dust somewhere. Cutting and gluing all those intricate shapes by hand is really unnecessary. Printing and laminating them would’ve been far more efficient and much less painful.

Worker Fees

I only found out about this when I was preparing to quit, which is completely unacceptable. They should’ve made it clear before joining that workers have to pay a fee. Instead, they told me right before I left that each worker had to pay around 2000 NTD (according to what Zhou Gong told me).

If I hadn’t planned to quit, would they have waited until after camp ended to mention it? Charging a fee is fine — but be transparent about it before people join. It’s a major factor in whether someone decides to participate or not. It shouldn’t come as a surprise when you’re leaving or when the event is already over.

Also, there was no recruitment orientation for the camp workers. You only find out what’s going on after you’ve joined and attended the general meeting for task assignments. Everything is learned on the fly. While the evaluation date is announced in advance, the time isn’t — meaning you have to keep the entire day open, which is ridiculous.

In short, the camp is full of unreasonable situations, so I recently decided to quit.
I’m still in negotiation with the leader, but I’m definitely leaving. If you’re a freshman though, you can still join — it’s honestly a fun experience, despite everything.