[This post needs action by you — yes, you the prospective student — in most cases!]

We’ve moved a great number of you over to the official student role for Orbital 2016!  If you log into Skylab using your NUSNET credentials, and we’ve been able to detect that you fulfil the eligibility criteria^*, you’ve been added to student list for Orbital 2016.  How do you tell?  If you’ve been moved to the official cohort, when you login to Skylab, you should see a role of “View as Student” available to you.

If you were already part of a team, you should see your automatically assigned team number as a blue button.  If you click on your team name, you’ll get a view that shows your teammate’s name, and your advisor’s name.  From here, you can click blue “Edit Team” button to rename your team to something a lot cooler than a serially generated number.  In the edit screen, you can also recalibrate your expected level of achievement that you’re currently aiming for (you can change this setting anytime — just try to make sure it’s up to date).  Don’t forget to save!

If you’re not yet part of a team, no worries about finding a partner — likely during Reading Week we’ll be having a short function to have you meet up with each other face to face at the School of Computing.  If you can form at team then with at least one member being a part of the School of Computing, you’ll be all set for Orbital, and we’ll ensure that your team gets into the cohort.

Regardless of whether you’re already part of a team or not, you should also take this time to better set up your Skylab account.  Clicking on the gear menu in the upper right top reveals the User Settings page.  Do try to add some of the links for content that you have (especially, which email address you expect to read email notifications from Skylab, and your programme of study^*).  Once you finish that, join the Orbital Slack group via https://orbital2016.slack.com/signup, which we will also be using for group chat and communication.  We recommend installing a client one for your mobile phone and turning the notifications on.

Looking forward to seeing you all soon at the mandatory Liftoff workshops on 9-10 May!

Missed any of that?  Check the bold text excerpts! (: 

^* Didn’t get in yet?  No worries, mate — for many, it’s just because we haven’t yet been able to check your affiliation to SoC.  We need this information that you can provide in Skylab’s User Settings to be correct in order to check your eligibility; if you didn’t set the programme of study field correctly, it’s difficult for us to gauge whether you can be a part of the cohort.  If you are an SoC student, please choose your programme of study (CS, IS, CEG, InfoSec, BZA, Others).  If you have some affiliation with the School of Computing through DDP, CDP or a minor, you should also choose “Others”, and specify your relation in the self-introduction field below.

For those of you whom are not associated with SoC by some means, we will be admitting you to the cohort on a more stringent basis; this is because we need to block enough seats for our own students first before allowing more cross-faculty registrations.  Stay tuned for more, but if you get too nervous, just drop us an email and we’ll check on your status.