O-Week!

Tempted by snacks and a moment's shade, a first-year student puts pen to paper and earns the first sticker on their glitzy new student card.

This is how most freshers get their student experience on during O-Week, when the university's myriad student societies and sports clubs set out their stalls on Jammie plaza.

Gymnasts and capoeiristas turned heads with flashy flips and stomach-turning somersaults, while development groups like Ubunye and Habitat for Humanity appealed to students' inner altruists. For the forward-looking, Investsoc is always a popular choice, as were the student-run publications like Varsity.

Some enthused students took a deep breath and signed up for five societies, and presumably for an extra course this semester, too, because, why not?

UCT Plaza Week 2017.

Others were circumspect, preferring to stake out their first semester through binoculars from across the street, coffee in hand, before (maybe) hurtling into extra-mural delights.

The week was capped off with the perennially popular Fresher's Braai on the evening of 9 March, where food, music and revelry allowed first-years to recover from a week of touring campus in searing heat and navigating UCT's corridors and computer labs for the first time.

In between all the excitement, students new and less new scrambled to register for classes, although lines were shorter than has become normal, thanks to online registration facilities.

Now stop reading and go to your lectures.

But wait – check out some of the best pics from O-Week first.

Story Yusuf Omar. Photos Robyn Walker.