Finals week

It's finals week. Well part 1 one of it. And I've been feeling like this for the past week:

I can't wait for summer. So much that I've run out of ways to stress that. While I can't wait to be done with finals it's pretty scary how fast almost a year has passed. Was it really this time one year ago that I was freaking out about my IB Finals?!

Well I've got stats over and done with as of 11am today. With all the relentless studying, I think, I might have understood it. Kinda'. So that's my own A to myself regardless of whatever NTU thinks. 

I've decided that this summer, I'm going to get off my lazy butt and earn my own money. .. Somehow. And read a book or two. I'm going to be 2 IQ points higher by the time the next semester rolls around, or so I hope. 

If I ain't got you

We were all supposed to be in Hong Kong for university in completely different schools, with a  promise which held that we'd meet up at least once a week for dinner. But life is life and that didn't happen. Now we're in 3 different countries, in 3 different schools, leading 3 different lives.

The beginning was tough. You meet all these people. You'd like to talk to them but you don't know what to say. You can't tell if they're going to be nice, a total bitch or your next best friend. You're so used to already having friends you grew up with that being thrown in such a situation becomes so unusual not to mention surreal. Lunch gets a little complicated. You skip meals because you don't want to be caught eating alone. It gets better though. You meet more people, join more activities and get busier. You do live, you do love, you do laugh.

But it isn't the same.

The peals of laughter we erupt into. The lunch time gossips. The sleepovers. The mad, hardcore studying we do for Biology. The hate messages the IBO sends in the form of IAs. The feasting. The dancing through corridors because seniors know they own the school. The sitting around in the college counsellors office just for hour-long chats. The moping around school because anything is better than getting back to more math. The mindless singing of pointless and never-should-have-been-created songs. The tone deaf singing of the most amazing songs ever. The shopping trips. The catching up of TV shows during classes. Learning the art of bull. The joy. The crying. The graduating. The comfort. Knowing you have each other and that all is bound to get better regardless.

I miss you guys a whole ton. I miss our incredibly dumb moments and the way we laugh. It's a far cry from a mermaid's singing or dolphin calls. Closer to a mixture of a stampede of rhinos and some cackling.

To me, however, it's the heartiest laughter.

Understanding

It's what my Statistics lecturer stresses we do. Not just when it comes to Statistics, but in everything we do for that is what we are here to learn in university.

High school was a good time. Picking colleges was a terrible time.

But I remember I wanted a small beautiful college in which I wasn't just a number, but was remembered by teachers and was nurtured to develop myself and my abilities. Then I got distracted by a whole ton of other things like rankings, my financial ability (okay this is pretty legit I suppose) and how successful I would be in finding a job after that. I wanted to be a doctor and I wanted to be a lawyer. Heck I wanted to be both. Searching through website after website of colleges, I made my own drafts and powerpoint presentations of the schools that offered what I wanted. They'd give me the chance to try out everything I wanted to try, they were absolutely beautiful, had great university spirit and they were small. Promising that the student teacher ratio was absolutely low, they guaranteed I wouldn't be just any other student - I would be someone. 

Having read an article about a guy who didn't do quite so well for his As and applied to NUS 4 times to get into the course of his dreams, I'm remembering what I wanted initially. No doubt he's incredibly talented and smart to have graduated top of his cohort after he gave up on that dream and applied to UNSW and then moved on to Oxford and Princeton. But I'm not too dumb too I suppose. 

My favourite subject while I did the IB in high school was History HL. It was absolute hell. My readings stacked up like there was no tomorrow and all I ever read was American history. But I learnt an incredible amount from it. Sources, criticizing, questioning, synthesizing my thoughts and developing the passion to ask questions to find out more. It may seem like a useless course because I'm not majoring in it now nor planning to be a historian any time in the future. In fact I didn't do quite so well for it in my finals but it remains to be my favourite because I worked my butt off for it, learnt, understood, analyzed and wanted to learn more. 

It's unlike Statistics (despite however enthusiastic my lecturers and tutors are) or most of the modules in my Business course where flipping through the textbooks and trying to understand the central limit theorem and Bayes Theorem not only puts me to sleep but is completely foreign to me. 

Much as I'd like to pursue what I love, to understand instead of memorizing, to make full use of the $9000 a year my parents are paying for my education, in Singapore's society, grades are everything. A C is not acceptable. An A- is only okay because you're not getting an A. A B isn't even average anymore. We're striving to improve our grades, pushing ourselves to get a GPA of 5 in the hopes of getting first class honours, to go on exchange and hopefully get a job at the Big 4 and earn trillions.

Learning and understanding is negligible.

Furthermore, going on exchange depends on one's GPA. Purely based on grades and anyones financial ability, no interviews are conducted to see if they really are interested to leave to learn, or if they're there just to clear more modules to lighten their load for the next semester. More often than not, we send over people who remain in their room in a country in Europe studying, studying and studying. 

Of course I'd like to have an impressive GPA, make the Dean's list and obtain a job that thousands of other business kids would love to have.

But I'm remembering again, that my goal is to be different, to learn and understand, be able to apply what I know and be more than just book-smart. I'd like to go see the world. To explore and be adventurous (no matter how cowardly I may get sometimes). To meet new people, stop being lazy and get out of my room to participate in more activities, quit procrastinating on statistics and embrace it, ask more questions. And finally, I'd like to make a change in the world.