O‑Camps, Joining the Zhuang, and Hall Controversies: A Full Record — From “Student-Run, Voluntary” to University Intervention at HKUST

In the days before the September semester begins, Clear Water Bay campus fills with freshmen in homemade team shirts shouting slogans at the top of their lungs, flanked by their “group fathers” and “group mothers” — this is the classic orientation scene at Hong Kong’s tertiary institutions, and HKUST is no exception. But unlike the century-deep collegiate orientation traditions at HKU or CUHK, HKUST’s orientation culture is built almost entirely on a single thread: student societies running things themselves. The University did not formally intervene until 2017. This article traces that evolution from “student-run, voluntary” to “university intervention,” covering O-Camp traditions, the culture of joining the zhuang (student executive committee), the group-father/group-mother system, and how this chapter handles the perennial controversies surrounding Hong Kong tertiary orientation camps.

For a freshman stepping up from secondary school, orientation camp is often the first time they truly participate — as an adult — in a self-organised group activity. No form teacher arranges the schedule; no exam marks the outcome; every rule of the game is designed and executed by senior students. This mode of operation — students taking responsibility for students — is itself the most distinctive part of Hong Kong’s tertiary orientation culture, and it is the core thread this article seeks to untangle: to what extent HKUST’s orientation and hall culture depends on student autonomy, and at what point, and in what way, the University’s formal intervention began.

---

# O-Camp: A Freshman Orientation Tradition Run by Student Societies

In the Hong Kong higher-education context, Orientation Camp (commonly called O‑Camp) is an important rite of passage that eases freshmen into university life. According to the Wikipedia entry on orientation camps in Hong Kong^※, at HKUST most orientation camps are organised by student societies, and participation is entirely voluntary^※. This differs from the practice at HKU and some CUHK colleges, where orientation is folded into the formal freshman education programme — at HKUST, orientation is, at root, a demonstration of “student self-governance.”

“Organised by student societies, voluntary participation” is the traditional backdrop of HKUST’s O-Camps. Departmental societies, hall residents’ associations, and cultural and interest clubs each run their own orientation camps. Freshmen are free to join based on their interests, and can even sign up for several camps across different systems at the same time. This “decentralised, multi-entry” model allows newcomers to plug into campus life through multiple community gateways: those who want to meet coursemates join the departmental society O-Camp; those who want to get to know their hall neighbours first join the hall residents’ association O-Camp; those passionate about a particular interest area might find kindred spirits through a club orientation. But the flip side of “voluntary” and “self-organised” is a strong streak of society autonomy — the University historically had an extremely light touch on what happened inside these camps. Activity design, funding, and safety oversight relied heavily on the experience passed down within student organisations themselves.

The vehicle for this accumulated experience is often a “camp process handbook” handed down from one generation to the next — compiled by the previous cohort of group parents, detailing activity design, time allocation, material checklists, and contingency plans for emergencies, then passed to the next organising committee for reference. Because the University was so hands-off, the quality and thoroughness of such handbooks directly determined an O-Camp’s execution standard. An organising committee lucky enough to inherit a handbook refined over multiple iterations, dense with detail, could save enormous amounts of trial-and-error; without one, they might have to design the entire programme from scratch, or even scramble on the day itself. This method of knowledge accumulation — oral tradition plus the handbook relay — is the most basic, and most fragile, link in the student self-governance ecosystem. If a particular year’s core members are collectively absent — due to imminent graduation, exchange programmes, or withdrawal — the chain of transmission can break, directly affecting the quality of the next year’s orientation camp.

Orientation camps are generally divided into “Big O” and “Small O”: large-scale orientation camps (Big O) are coordinated by the student union or school societies, while smaller orientation camps (Small O) are run by individual departmental or faculty societies^※, typically lasting anywhere from two to seven days. Compared with some older, larger collegiate universities, HKUST — having no collegiate structure — sees the “Big O” role distributed more among its student union and various school and departmental societies, a more fragmented pattern.

This decentralisation is also reflected in the venues and formats of the camps. Departmental O-Camps usually take place off-campus (at youth campsites or holiday villages) one to two weeks before term begins, running two-to-three-day intensive programmes that include team games, introductions to departmental society culture, and experience-sharing from senior students. Hall residents’ association O-Camps are more “home-ground” affairs — they use the hostel’s own facilities and floor spaces, tend to be lighter in structure and shorter in duration, usually one or two days. As for the orientations run by various interest clubs (such as societies under the Arts and Culture Union or the Sports Union), they focus even more on “making friends through shared interests,” with activities designed around the society’s core projects — a music society might include an impromptu jam session, while a sports society’s camp would hardly go without a taster of its signature sport. If a freshman signs up for camps on all three tracks — departmental, hall, and club — then, in theory, the whole first half of September before term starts can be packed solid with orientation activities. This is one of the first scenes many HKUST students recall when they look back on their first year.

---

# Group Fathers and Group Mothers: How a “Fictive Kinship” System Works

HKUST’s O-Camps follow the “group parent” system common across Hong Kong tertiary orientation camps: each group is typically led by two to four senior students (or alumni) acting as Group Father and Group Mother, who are responsible for guiding a group of freshmen (colloquially called “group sons” and “group daughters”) into campus life and community culture. This temporary relationship network, constructed using kinship terms, is a distinctive feature of Hong Kong’s tertiary orientation culture. Group parents often need to begin preparing weeks or even months in advance — planning the activity flow, designing icebreaker games, arranging accommodation and transport — and they stay in touch with group members long after the camp ends, forming an informal cross-year mentorship network.

For many freshmen, group parents are the first “familiar faces” they meet at university. This relationship can sometimes last a whole university career and even develop into a long-term peer support network. Serving as a group parent is also the starting point of many students’ journey of shang zhuang — organising an orientation camp requires dividing work with other zhuang members and coordinating with departmental or hall resources; this kind of experience often becomes the CV foundation for later running for office in a hall residents’ association or departmental society executive committee.

Preparations by group parents typically begin in the second semester of the preceding academic year: recruiting group parent candidates, forming groups, designing camp themes and schedules, booking venues and transport, writing team songs and chants, creating team T-shirt designs — these interlocking steps often demand sustained commitment over several months. On the day of the camp itself, group parents must juggle the dual role of “atmosphere driver” and “safety gatekeeper”: they need to ensure the games are lively and group members are engaged, while also monitoring individual members’ physical condition and emotional ups and downs, and calling a halt or dialling down the intensity when necessary. Striking this balance between high spirits and safety depends heavily on the group parents’ own experience accumulated at past orientation camps — which is why students who serve as group parents were themselves almost always “group sons and daughters” in earlier years; the experience is passed down.

Once the camp is over, the bond between group parents and group members does not end with the closing ceremony. Many groups maintain a “group WhatsApp/Telegram chat,” regularly organising meals, revision sessions, or even New Year’s gatherings. Some group parents continue to monitor their members’ academic adjustment, acting as informal peer counsellors. Though this network carries no institutional weight, it is often one of the earliest and most stable social anchors a freshman builds in an unfamiliar campus.

---

# Shang Zhuang: The Necessary Path from Group Parent to Executive Committee

“Shang zhuang” (pronounced soeng5 zong1 in Cantonese) is the common term across Hong Kong universities for joining a student organisation’s executive committee (the zhuang), and it is equally current at HKUST. Whether for a hall residents’ association, a departmental society, or any kind of club, executive committee members are colloquially called zhuang members (zong1 jyun4), and the entire committee of a given term is referred to as “a zhuang.”

The shang zhuang ecosystem at HKUST is tightly intertwined with the hall system. Halls I through V each have a House Students’ Association (House SA), whose zhuang members are elected by current residents. They work closely with Resident Masters (RMs), Residential Life Officers (RLOs), and postgraduate hall tutors to plan activities and boost resident participation. Halls VI through IX, which do not have formal House SAs, rely instead on bodies such as the Connection Team, Leadership Team, and Organizing Team to perform similar functions (see Hall Culture Deep-Dive^※ for details). House SAs are affiliated societies of HKUSTSU and hold seats on the HKUSTSU Council, making shang zhuang a formal pathway to a voice in campus governance.

Shang zhuang experience has long been regarded as an important part of a Hong Kong undergraduate’s university career: it means taking on practical responsibilities in activity planning, financial management, and external liaison, and it also means navigating the division of labour, differences of opinion, and even interpersonal friction among zhuang members. This is why “shang zhuang” and “hall controversies” are placed side by side in this chapter’s title: orientation camp operations and zhuang affairs are precisely the arenas where hall politics and student-autonomy friction are most likely to surface.

The life cycle of a zhuang can be roughly divided into four stages: election and handover (usually early in the second semester; the candidate cabinet must submit a manifesto, face questioning from the incumbent zhuang, and be confirmed by a vote of all members or the representative council); bedding-in and planning (the new zhuang must complete financial and material handover with the outgoing zhuang while beginning to plan the new academic year’s O‑Camp and regular activities); execution and operations (covering activity organisation for the entire academic year — O‑Camp is typically the new zhuang’s first, and most pressure-filled, “live-fire test”); and review and baton-passing (compiling financial reports and activity records at year’s end, leaving reference materials for the next zhuang). This cycle is almost entirely dependent on student self-organisation; the University’s role in it is mainly that of a gatekeeper for venue approval and basic safety standards, not deep involvement in content or personnel matters.

Friction over the division of labour among zhuang members is one of the most frequently mentioned — yet least publicly documented — parts of the shang zhuang experience. Uneven financial allocations, conflicting views on activity direction, individual members “bailing” (backing out at the last minute) and dumping their workload onto others — these tensions are common across the zhuang operations of all kinds of student organisations. However, constrained by the editorial principle of “not including named negative content lacking a reliable source,” this chapter does not catalogue the internal disputes of any specific HKUST zhuang of a particular term. It merely notes that such friction is a structural component of the zhuang ecosystem, not an exception unique to one term or one organisation.

---

# The 2017 Turning Point: The University’s First O-Camp and “First-Year at Residence”

A major turning point in HKUST’s orientation culture came in 2017. According to a university announcement, HKUST launched the “First-Year Experience @ Residence” (FYE) programme in August 2017, along with the University’s first-ever university-run orientation camp^※.

This was a significant change. Before this, HKUST’s orientation was essentially dominated by student societies, with the University’s role little more than “venue provider.” From 2017 onwards, the University began to directly intervene in orientation and residential education — in a sense, a “backfill” operation addressing the limitations of a purely student-autonomy model. According to the announcement, the FYE programme aimed to help first-year students transition smoothly and adapt to university life, and to foster an inclusive and caring learning environment through participation in hall activities^※.

The pilot’s scale and mechanisms, per the announcement, were as follows:

According to research cited in the announcement, students who participate in such residential programmes, compared with those in traditional housing arrangements, show significantly higher levels of engagement in student clubs and interaction with peers and faculty^※. This was the theoretical basis for the FYE programme: upgrading “residence” from mere accommodation to structured “residential education.” It was also the first time the University had tried to use institutional muscle to step into a domain long dominated by student self-governance.

One detail of the FYE mentorship system is worth noting: SUG mentors were required to undergo training that included mental health awareness. This was, in some measure, a response to the widespread public concern in Hong Kong in recent years over the safety and insufficient mental-health support associated with “icebreaker games” at tertiary orientation camps — although the official HKUST announcement did not explicitly state this policy motivation, the direction of the training content and the timing of public concern broadly align.

Beyond the FYE programme, HKUST’s New Student Orientation Office (NSO) has in recent years continued to coordinate a more formal, official orientation framework. According to the NSO 2025 orientation page^※, freshmen receive information about officially arranged orientation activities before and after enrolment, covering academic registration guidance, campus facility tours, and cross-cultural adaptation workshops — elements that lean more “administrative” and “informational.” This complements the student-society-run O‑Camps: the NSO is responsible for “letting freshmen know what to do and where to go,” while the O‑Camps are responsible for “letting freshmen feel where they belong.” These two threads run in parallel, forming the complete support system for new HKUST students.

It is also worth noting that, according to the UG Resident Handbook 2024‑25^※, the University has issued a detailed handbook for hall residents covering accommodation rules, safety notices, facilities usage guidelines, and emergency contact information. While such a handbook may lack the emotional warmth of an O‑Camp led by group parents, it is an indispensable “instruction manual” for freshmen adjusting to hall life — especially for non-local students. The handbook’s explanations of local Hong Kong living habits (such as waste-sorting rules, quiet hours, and visitor registration procedures) often help them adapt to their new living environment far more directly than any orientation game.

---

# Official Orientation vs. Student-Run Orientation: How the Two Systems Divide the Work

Placing the NSO’s official orientation framework, the FYE programme, and the student-society-run O‑Camps side by side, one can see that HKUST’s freshman orientation system is actually composed of three layers:

1. Information Layer (NSO): Responsible for delivering “hard information” such as registration, course selection, and campus facilities. The format leans towards briefing sessions, guided tours, and handbook distribution, covering all freshmen with no sign-up or grouping required.
2. Education Layer (FYE): Built around the SUG mentorship system, focusing on first-year residential adaptation and psychological support. It covers first-year students who apply for hall residence, with resources particularly tilted towards non-local students.
3. Community Layer (O‑Camp): Run independently by departmental societies, hall residents’ associations, and clubs, focusing on building a sense of community belonging and personal networks. Participation is entirely voluntary; the format is the most diverse and carries the strongest ritual sense of “university life.”

These three layers did not appear overnight. Before 2017, HKUST effectively had only the third layer (student-run O‑Camps) in operation. Information delivery relied mainly on email notices from departmental administrative offices, and a unified “education layer” of support was absent. The launch of the FYE programme, to some extent, filled the gap between “information” and “community”: it is neither as purely administrative as the NSO, nor does it fully depend on the vagaries of student self-governance. Instead, through institutionalised mentor pairing, it provides a “safety net” of adaptive support for the first-year students who need it most — especially non-local students.

---

# Perennial O‑Camp Controversies: How This Chapter Handles Them

Certain elements within Hong Kong’s university O‑Camp culture — such as certain icebreaker activities framed as “games,” or “group bonding” exercises involving physical contact or intrusive personal questions — have long sparked controversial discussion in society. Media outlets have periodically reported on inappropriate behaviour or safety incidents at orientation camps at individual institutions. When such discussions involve specific allegations of conduct against living individuals, this site’s protocols require careful handling: named negative content lacking a reliable source is not included. Even when a reliable source exists, negative contexts involving living persons are referred to by surname plus “Mr./Ms.” or by position title; full names are not used for identification.

In the case of HKUST, there are limited records of controversy that are publicly verifiable, backed by a specific source, and clearly attributable to HKUST orientation camps. This chapter follows the principle of “no verified specific incident, no fabrication” — it does not force-fit controversy reports from other institutions just to have “case studies,” nor does it make sweeping judgements about the “safety” or “cultural health” of HKUST O‑Camps. Should reliable sources disclose specific, verifiable incidents at HKUST O‑Camps in the future, they will be added in accordance with the BLP and credibility-tiering standards. Incidents from 2019 onwards bearing political overtones are systematically redirected to History of Student Movements^※; this chapter does not overstep into that territory.

This principle extends to the very subject of “hall controversies.” Frictions over zhuang affairs, disputes over activity funding, and internal conflicts within executive committees can indeed arise in the operation of halls and orientation camps. Such friction is normal in any organisation that relies on student self-governance. But unless a reliable, publicly verifiable source explicitly records the details of a specific incident and the responses of the parties involved, this chapter will not list rumours in the posture of an “exposé” — unsubstantiated hearsay, however prevalent, is left blank rather than presented as an “incident.” This is also the concrete application of this site’s “every claim must be traceable to a source” principle to the topics of orientation and hall life: the “controversies” in the title refer to the structural tensions inherent in this domain (the burdens and pressures of student self-governance, the frictions of internal organisation and division of labour), not to a specific, named scandal.

This approach itself also reflects a characteristic of HKUST’s “student-society-run, voluntary” O‑Camp model. Because activities are highly dispersed among dozens of departmental societies, hall residents’ associations, and clubs, each organising their own, the density of unified university records and systematic external media coverage is naturally lower than that for large orientation camps coordinated by a single college at a collegiate university. This is both a strength of the “decentralised” model (risk is spread, formats are diverse) and a limitation (transparency and accountability mechanisms are comparatively weaker).

---

# Hall Culture: Building Community Identity Through Halls

At a university without colleges, halls of residence shoulder part of the community-building function that colleges would otherwise perform, and orientation camp is the first incubator of that sense of identity. According to the SHRL page, the Hall Education Team organises regular floor gatherings where residents can exchange ideas, discuss issues, and socialise^※; these activities aim to promote inter-hall interaction, cultural exchange, fitness, and sportsmanship^※. Hall Orientation is an opportunity for residents to get to know one another in a relaxed setting (such as over dinner together) — this constitutes a third thread of orientation, beyond “Big O” and “Small O,” one that is closer to daily life.

From the perspective of the university’s founding narrative, hall culture is especially important to HKUST’s orientation system for three reasons:

1. Substituting for the community function of colleges. At a “college-free” HKUST, the halls are the primary place where freshmen build a sense of belonging and form stable social circles — functionally filling part of the gap left by the absence of colleges. Orientation camp is the first ritual that activates this function.
2. The vehicle for inter-hall sports. Athletic rivalries between halls (see HKUST Teams, Intervarsity Games, and Robotics Team^※ for details) are one of the most dynamic expressions of hall identity, and the enthusiasm for participation can often be traced back to the community bonds forged during orientation camp.
3. A bridge for non-local student integration. The deliberate inclusion of roughly 125 non-local students in the FYE programme reflects the expectation that halls and orientation camps together will shoulder the function of promoting integration between local and non-local students — a role that becomes increasingly important as the proportion of non-local students continues to rise.

To some extent, a subtle “recruitment” competition also exists between hall residents’ association O‑Camps and departmental society O‑Camps. A freshman’s time and energy are limited, and signing up for multiple orientation camps eats into a fair amount of holiday. So hall residents’ associations and departmental societies often need to differentiate their camp content to attract freshmen to prioritise their own sessions. The hall residents’ association’s advantage is proximity: freshmen are going to live in the hostel anyway, so joining a camp on their own floor is an almost “zero-cost” option, plus it lets them get to know the neighbours they will live with day in and day out for the coming year. The departmental society’s advantage is “subject relevance”: orientation content often includes practical information such as senior students’ course recommendations and appraisals of professors’ styles, which is of more direct value to freshmen coping with academic pressure. The two are not mutually exclusive; many freshmen opt for the combination strategy: “Hall O‑Camp to meet the neighbours, Departmental O‑Camp to gather academic intelligence.”

---

# Summary: Three Stages from “Student-Run, Voluntary” to “University Intervention”

Placing HKUST’s orientation and shang zhuang culture on a timeline reveals a clear evolution:

• Early period (from the 1991 founding): Orientation was primarily student-society-run and voluntary, displaying strong autonomy. The group-parent system and shang zhuang culture were the core mechanisms of this era.
• From 2017 onwards: The University launched the FYE programme and its first university-run orientation camp, beginning to incorporate “residential education” into its formal educational mission — in part a response to the limitations of a purely student-autonomy model.
• The present day: Against a backdrop of a rising non-local student ratio and an increasingly diverse campus, orientation camps and halls are being vested with clearer “integration” and “care” functions. At the same time, student-society-run O‑Camps remain the first port of call for the vast majority of freshmen.

This evolution reflects HKUST’s effort to strike a balance between “tradition of student autonomy” and “the University’s duty of care in educating students” — preserving the vitality and diversity of student-run orientation while providing an institutional support network, through programmes like FYE, for freshmen’s adaptation and integration, especially for those who are non-local.

Viewing this progression within the larger narrative of HKUST’s development reveals a further layer of meaning. HKUST is a young university, just over three decades old. It has no centuries-old colleges or student societies with a corpus of “handed-down canon” orientation traditions to replicate. Its orientation culture has been almost entirely built from scratch by successive cohorts of students, through trial and error, since the university’s founding. This means HKUST’s O‑Camp culture has an intrinsically “built-from-the-ground-up” pragmatism about it. Elements like the group-parent system and shang zhuang culture, while adapted from common practices at other Hong Kong institutions, are more flexible in their concrete implementation at the departmental and hall level because they are unencumbered by historical baggage. The University’s intervention after 2017 was, to some degree, a “patch” applied to reinforce this “bottom-up-grown” orientation ecosystem, not a bulldozing and rebuilding. The deliberate choice to run the FYE programme in parallel with — not as a replacement for — the existing O‑Camp system was itself a kind of respect for the tradition of student self-governance.

For an individual freshman, this “three-layer orientation system” means the starting point of life at HKUST often involves three parallel threads of adjustment layered on top of one another: administrative adaptation (NSO), residential adaptation (FYE/SUG mentors), and community adaptation (O‑Camp/group parents). Together, they constitute “the first lesson of university,” a lesson whose weight is arguably no less than any formal credit-bearing course. And of these three threads, only the student-run O‑Camp is built entirely on the voluntary commitment of senior students — which is precisely why the emotional weight and cultural depth it carries is something the official orientation framework finds hard to fully replace.

Note: The FYE programme figures cited in this article (approximately 500 participants, 125 non-local students, 69 mentors, etc.) are from the 2017 pilot and are time-sensitive. The programme has expanded and been adjusted year by year. Before citing, please refer to the latest official HKUST announcement.

---

# Frequently Asked Questions

Q: Are HKUST orientation camps (O‑Camps) run by the university or by students?

A: The vast majority are student-run. Departmental societies, hall residents’ associations (HSAs), and various interest clubs each organise their own orientation camps. Participation is entirely voluntary, and freshmen can sign up for multiple camps across different systems at the same time. The University long played the role of venue provider, only intervening for the first time in 2017 by launching the “First-Year Experience @ Residence” (FYE) programme and holding the university’s first-ever university-level orientation camp.

Q: Does HKUST have an official orientation website? Where should I go for information?

A: Yes. HKUST’s New Student Orientation Office (NSO) maintains an official orientation page, responsible for delivering administrative and informational content such as academic registration, course selection, and campus facility tours. It covers all freshmen with no sign-up or grouping required. This complements the O‑Camps run by departmental societies and hall residents’ associations — the NSO handles “letting freshmen know what to do,” while O‑Camps handle “letting freshmen feel where they belong.”

Q: Do HKUST O‑Camps have “Big O” and “Small O”?

A: Yes. Large-scale orientation camps (Big O) are coordinated by the student union or school societies, while smaller orientation camps (Small O) are run by individual departmental or faculty societies, typically lasting two to seven days. Because HKUST has no collegiate structure, the “Big O” role is distributed among the student union and various school and departmental societies, creating a more fragmented pattern distinct from collegiate universities where a single college coordinates a large-scale camp.

Q: How does the group-father/group-mother system work at HKUST O‑Camps?

A: Each group is typically led by two to four senior students (or alumni) acting as Group Father and Group Mother, responsible for guiding a group of freshmen (“group sons and daughters”) into campus life and community culture. Preparations begin in the second semester of the previous academic year, covering grouping, camp process design, venue and transport booking, and making team T-shirts and chants. The relationships usually continue after the camp ends, forming an informal peer support network.

Q: Is there a specific record of controversial incidents at HKUST O‑Camps over the years?

A: This site adopts the principle of “no verified specific incident, no fabrication.” Unless a reliable, publicly verifiable source explicitly records the details of a specific incident and the responses of the parties involved, this site will not list rumours in the posture of an “exposé.” Incidents from 2019 onwards bearing political overtones are systematically redirected to the special topic on the History of Student Movements; this chapter does not overstep into that territory.

---