Things No One Told Me About UNSW Part 2

The unwritten rules of UNSW that orientation won’t cover.

First Week: Collect Everything and Attend More Than One Day

Your first week checklist:

• Collect your student ID card.
• Get an Opal card for public transport.
• Pick up a local SIM card.
• Set up your bank account.
• Attend orientation.

Attend the society stalls (Arc Clubs Fair). Joining societies in your first week puts you in rooms with students across year levels. Those connections pay off faster than you’d expect.

Learn the Three Systems That Run Your Academic Life

UNSW uses three platforms and confusing them wastes a lot of time.

myUNSW is for administration: course enrolment, fee payments, exam results, and official communications. This is where you manage your academic record.

Moodle is where your actual courses live: lecture recordings, slides, assignment submissions, and rubrics. Each course has its own Moodle page that opens when term begins.

Learn all three in your first week. Don’t wait until an assignment is due.

The Professor Matters More Than the Course Name

This is the most important tactical advice in this post.

The same course at UNSW can be genuinely enjoyable or deeply stressful depending entirely on who is teaching it that term. Marking style, assignment structure, lecture quality, how responsive staff.

Before you lock in your courses for any term, ask seniors:

• Who is teaching this course this term?
• What was the assignment workload like?
• How were group projects structured?
• What did the final exam actually look like?

If a course runs in both T1 and T2 and the T2 lecturer is significantly better, sometimes waiting is worth it. You’d never know this from the course description alone.

Where to find seniors: your program’s Facebook group, Discord server, or WhatsApp group. CSE Society and Women in Engineering UNSW also have active student communities.

The Census Date Is the Most Important Date in the Term

Every term, UNSW has a census date usually around Week 4 of teaching. This is the last day you can withdraw from a course without academic or financial penalty.

After the census date, a failing or withdrawn course appears on your academic record and you remain financially liable for the fees.

Before every census date:

• Are you keeping up with all your enrolled courses?
• Is the workload manageable?
• Are there any enrolment errors to fix?

If something isn’t working a course is harder than expected, your timetable clashes, you took on too much the census date is your decision deadline. Missing it has real consequences. Put it in your calendar at the start of every term.

The Other Date Everyone Forgets: Exam Timetables

Exam timetables are released several weeks before the end of term. The moment they go up, check yours immediately. Missing an exam is worse.

Career Planning: Start in Term 1, Not Term 3

Most students plan to start applying for internships “later” and then realise in their second year that everyone who started in T1 has a head start they can’t close quickly.

In your very first term:

• Set up your LinkedIn properly photo, headline, education, and a short summary
• Attend at least one career fair or networking event on campus (UNSW Career & Employment runs these regularly)
• Join a society that gives you access to industry connections (CSE Society, Women in Engineering, and similar)
• Start your resume even if it feels early

For MIT students specifically: companies recruiting for software engineering and ML roles look for GitHub activity, projects, and internship experience. The students who stand out in final year started building their portfolio in first term.

Internship applications for the following summer often open in March and April. If you’re not paying attention in T1, you miss the first wave entirely.

The Resources That Are Actually Good (Use Them Early)

Academic Skills — free writing consultations and study skills workshops run by UNSW. Genuinely useful before major assignments or if you’re struggling with academic writing in English. Don’t wait until you’re desperate.

UNSW Library — the upper floors are much quieter than the ground floor and better for focused study. Your student account comes with print credits use the library printers before paying anywhere else.

UNSW Counselling — available to all students. You don’t need to be in crisis to use it. Transition to postgrad study, especially internationally, is legitimately hard.

Career & Employment — resume reviews and mock interviews are available by appointment. Book these before applications open, not the week you need to submit.

This is Part 2 of a two-part series. [Read Part 1: From Offer Letter to Landing in Sydney →]

Written by a UNSW Master of IT student who learned most of this the hard way.