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Hello faithful reader, the A levels are over! And after this post, I won't be posting anymore on this blog. You can continue to read more at the following URL. Please re-link!
www.limesface.wordpress.com
There was a certain sense of nostalgia when I decided to close this blog down for good. After all, I've used it for five years and it's seen me through a whole lot of rubbish in my life. Plus I'm pretty honoured that it has enjoyed more than 100,000 hits, so thank you whoever has been reading devoutly! I appreciate it much.
However, time has come for change, and I realize a site change would be one of the main ways to do it. So there you are! A levels have ended now so I figure I will be posting rather frequently unless I'm caught and stuck away from the computer.
Goodbye, won't be visiting this blog until some time later!
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It's one more week to the A levels; by any right I shouldn't even be wasting any time here on this blog but browsing through online history articles, wikipedia, and reading some blogs every now and then has allowed me to be struck by another timely epiphany:
It's about one week to an exam, that will determine how much you have developed academically in your past six years - true enough, it'll be crucially important. Because any single mistake or folly that you make at this point of time (e.g. falling sick which is a utterly brilliant mistake that I have honourably committed) will deprive your own performance abilities and shortchange your own results, giving you an inaccurate and painfully unfair measure of how good you are. But apart from benchmarking your academic prowess it doesn't do anything else.
The A levels doesn't benchmark your academic progress, it's your own personal improvement that does. So if any of you are sinking into despair over the countless comparisons that you're making with the high-scorers around in school, please don't fret because ultimately it boils down to how much you've done to keep getting better, rather than how good you've always been. I've always respected the people who have experienced the struggle, more than people who've always had it going for them.
True enough, everyone's going to assess your extent of success for the past 18 years of your life - in the past eighteen years since you were born, these grades are a surrogate for their worth (well, because we aren't earning salaries yet). Hence it's no surprise and wonder why a lot of us are going into frenzies over what's to come and how well they will do. I say, fret not again. Because while the tangibles (like grades, positions, awards, grades, grades and well yes, grades) are the main things which people can and only look to, there's a lot beyond the surface that seriously really counts. Clichéd statement you might say, but in the future it's going to take a lot more than the As on your report card to decide whether you have conquered life, or not.
Behind all that relentless studying, senseless gushing over universities and our chances of getting into them, think about the defining moments where you truly felt you ever learnt something serious about life. Those times where you felt have totally transformed you, and have made you improve as a person, or developed your own individual character in a certain sort of way. I personally believe those times are more crucial than any single groundbreaking research achievement, or any single astounding essay improvement in school, or any personal best on the court or on the track.
Essentially, go ahead and strive, do the best you ever can - but don't forget to be yourself. Never ever let go of your own person and lose yourself in these cold realities. The world doesn't want puppets who chase after targets, the world wants personal heroes who chase after their dreams. And dreams aren't top colleges, or prestigious scholarships, or grand jobs. They are goals which accentuate you further as an individual person and make you proud of who you are.
All the best everyone (: this will all end before we know it.
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I'm breaking this blogging hiatus just for once because I stumbled across this rather interesting online article. It's pretty late and a rather foolish time to be thinking about one's future, especially during a time like now where we have to slog it out just for these futures to be realized. But, a lot of us will be applying to both US and UK universities - in the case that you get into both countries' colleges and you want to make a final decision, consider this:
UK vs. USA Education SystemUpdated on Thursday 13 September 2007
Universities and Colleges are reputedly the hallowed halls of intellectual development, the schools of maturation from where the leaders of our world emerge to set the world ablaze with the fruits of intellectualism. However, the produce all vary in flavours according the nature of the curriculum prescribed. The most marked divergence of tastes lie within institutions separated by oceans, and continents. Although the UK and USA share an Anglo-Saxon culture, disparities are marked within ideals of their respective education systems, further being indicative of their particular cultures.
In the USA, no matter if one is enrolled in a state school or a private liberal arts college, it is expected that students will study academic subjects outside their intended field of study. The premise of which is to cultivate a rounded individual, comfortably conversant with all mediums of academic literature, whether of artistic or scientific character. Hence on American campuses you will discover scenarios where historians may be taking courses in astrophysics.
Needless to say such a scenario would not engender smiles on the faces of their British counterparts, who've journeyed through system of education where from an early age specialization has been expected. Thus by the time these students commence their undergraduate training they are only expected to study within their chosen area of study. (This happens to less of a degree in Scottish universities, where students are encouraged to explore topics beyond their major, although in reality students rarely venture beyond their chosen faculty.
These structural differences influence changes within the deliverance of classes. Due to obligation of students to study outside their fields of study the US prescribes a broader, but less in depth of an enquiry of study. Whereas, breadth is shunned in favour of more narrowly focused, but deeper lines of study within British establishments. Each system has its strengths and weaknesses. Critics of British education would point towards the enforced learning of unnecessary information, whereas defenders of the British universities may counter by accusations of dumbing down in college classes. My personal perception, based from studying in two small universities/colleges in the UK and the US, that aside from a divergence between curriculum's, there is a marked difference of ethos between UK and USA higher education institutions.
On American campuses, work is constantly requested from students on a daily basis. In contrast the British university calendar invites extra-intensive work in patches, separated by periods of lulls, thus creating large tracts of downtime between assignments. It this downtime that characterises the British university lifestyle where social life is the veritable engine of UK university life, pushing academia into the passenger seat. In contrast academia takes the fore in America colleges, largely due to structured system in American colleges brought by an emphasis upon teaching. Work is definitely more intensive in American colleges, which is to be expected given that American students pay significantly more than their British counterparts, and hence American students tend to be more motivated than their apathetic British counterparts.
So concluding with my personal endnote of bias, I would have to admit that American Colleges invite more of a rigorous, dynamic intellectually arousing ethos, though at the expense of cultivating an active social scene. The lessons derived within the UK university establishment arise from outside the classroom within the pubs and clubs, where social development rather than intellectual development takes preponderance. Choose your pick!
- By Sunjit "Sunny" Lalli
On a sidenote, I'll probably be leaving this blog shortly after the A levels end. I've been writing on this blog since the start of fourteen, and I think it's a good time to close this site for good just to lock away these memories of a teenage, Rafflesian life. Besides, a new life chapter needs a fresh new place, and a fresh new look. But i'll leave all this new-chapter-mapping to after A levels. Study hard everyone don't give up! Only a few weeks more!
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Logic of the day:
If you want to be superhuman,
your efforts must be superhuman.
So therefore, this will be my very first HIATUS;
I won't be back until after the A levels!
THIS IS IT
TAKE THESE TESTS BY THE HORNS,
BRING THEM DOWNNN.
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Tomorrow onwards everything will change, alright!
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I'm in school, and the last thing I remembered doing was walking towards the sofa. The next thing I knew, I woke up lying on it an hour later, with a throbbing head and more painfully a sense of lost time.
So now as I scramble around trying to retrieve my bearings and making sense of what's happening around me I shall return here to post yet again. I even feel funnily detached as I type this so it does feel a little creepy.
About a fortnight remains to the second most important exam in our lives. It's just that real, yet so surreal for the fact that I'm not adopting a good sleep pattern + my room still happens to remain the very warzone it was a few weeks ago, with notes and worksheets of all subjects mixed and mashed to form two undefeatable mountain stacks. Everytime I have to search for something important it costs me an entire journey of digging and swimming until I find it - and probably with the other half missing and hiding elusively within the very same stack. It's cost me some time, and it will continue to cost me further time so I shall make sure I FINISH WHATEVER THAT CONCERNS FILING AND ORGANIZING BY THIS WEEKEND, YES REMINDER TO SELF.
Many many worries concerns breathing down my neck, haha I can never really stop worrying. About how math will come back to haunt me, about how history will make my head explode, and about how everything else in between will stupefy me. But yet again it's quite liberating to gradually feel that you have an increasingly clearer idea about what your entire syllabus is about and you start to be able to answer questions quite steadily. Still, time constraints have quite a constricting effect, to the effect of a chokehold on your neck, or something like that yada blah blah.
H3 HISTORY IS DUE SOON. SO GET IT DONE.
Actually everything is due soon - get everything done.
Oh, my god.
I'm still not thinking right hahah.
Okay gameplan, rush and study and keep at it.
Somehow I just want to account for these bouts of deep-sleep dozes.
It feels very horrible to wake up halfway and not know where you are, what you were doing, or perhaps even Who You Are, hahaha OKAY STUDY LA STUDY JONLIM.
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School has been peaceful, but agonizingly boring.
I decided to be a good boy today (in unintentional but utmost support of the nation's social distancing initiatives) and returned home immediately after lessons ended, so that I'd give myself quite a bit of time to start filing up all my notes and stuff because right now they're stressing me out quite badly. It's come to the point where I suddenly think of some set of important notes that were lying around at home and I start to freak out because I have completely no inking of where they really are. I subsequently go home and start flipping around, and start yelling OMG WHERE ON EARTH IS IT I CANNOT FIND IT AT ALL AHHHHHHHHHHHHHH and after a few hours I give up, thinking I'll find it tomorrow. But yes wonderfully, that never really happens.
But ah yes quite amazingly, I realize I've spent a few hours on a single econs essay and now I'm sitting here wondering where in the world did all that free time go. I seriously don't like this - I just hope that school will stop piling homework on us real soon because force-feeding practice isn't really working on me! I just want my free time and my own free space.
Okay enough about studying, I didn't come here to ramble on about how fantastic prelim / A level preparations are. I think things are changing a whole lot. Over the past week so many small subtle things have happened but yet they all have a certain impact on my future. Like talking to teachers about what I'm going to study after JC, where I wish to go to (pretty interestingly I had this small debate with Ms Ng over US/UK and I found it really helpful), and wondering if I'll ever end up in the places I hope to end up in.
Plus I had an additional commandos vocational assessment the other day and it opened my eyes up to a whole new world where people can actually jump past the standing broad jump mat and do unlimited pullups. Quite crazy but yes it's a possible prospect. I'm honestly quite worried about the commandos results, really could do with a definite verdict so that I'll know what to do and where to go on from here, but oh well uncertainty's always commonplace.
I don't like this blog template anymore, it's growing off me. But I have no time to make a new one. It'll have to wait.
I still miss council!
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