Still Alive
Hey there, whoever I’m supposed to address. This is an overly overdue blog entry, but yahoo it’s here and it exists, and it will lend a sense of activity in this otherwise seemingly dormant blog.
Actually, this format of blogwriting is getting familiar, come to think of it. The previous paragraph was me expressing the overdueness of the entry, and this next part is me summing up what I’ve missed to write. Haha, predictability is an interesting thing. Not sure if it’s good or bad, though.
So what has happened since my last post? Exams, oh yes yes, the exams. My primary reason why I was unable to blog. Exams went OK, I think, although it is increasingly becoming clear to me that I really do much better in my Literature/English modules than my Maths/Stats modules.
I mugged hard for these exams, especially because, as I’ve earlier mentioned, this year, Year Three, is a most critical year, AND because I had back-to-back exams in one day for two days. It was mugging at the Central Forum, Cnetral Library, CFA Studios for me again, and with different study buddies. It’s been fun mugging with you Karen, Ivy & Rohit, Hayati, and Choir members Iris, Aaron, Joanne, Kurien, etc. It’s been fun mugging with myself, too (and this is not me just being lame), but really, mugging alone does wonders sometimes (if you don’t fall asleep).
Let me just share a few remarkable tidbits about my exams. The first day was English day, and my exams were EL2101: Structure of Sentences and Meanings, followed by GEK1046 Introduction to Cultural Studies. The EL2101 exam was very good. It was open-book, it wasn’t easy, but get this, it was the first exam ever, in my stay at NUS, that I felt confident about. Seriously. The final grade is made up of three quizzes, tutorial participation, and the exam, and Joseph has thankfully received full marks for all three quizzes, and believed tutorial participation was not a problem at all. And thus the immense feeling of relief and satisfaction after the EL2101 exam. Come on, Joseph’s one anal grammar police.
The next exam that day, GEK1046: Intro to Cultural Studies, was quite a pleasant surprise too. I checked the past year exams, and usually, the format would be one page, and a list of five questions would be given, from which the examinee would choose two to tackle, or two questions would be given upfront. When I arrived at the exam hall and took my seat, I stared at the front page of the exam in slight disbelief. This exam paper consists of two questions and 12 printed pages, it said. Twelve? I opened the paper and it was a most pleasant surprise. Lots of large cool colored images! Full-page, colored advertisements and cultural imags and icons, to be specific. Haha, that’s a first, I thought. We never have colored images in our exams, and these were lovely, lovely ads too. The first question required us to perform a cultural analysis of one of these: a promotional poster of the TV show Nip/Tuck, this strange image of a car under a blue sky, an image of Human Pac-man (a hyperreality project by NUS students), this new Ipod mixer of sorts, or this image of androgynous David Bowie, in a skirt and reclining on a sofa. The next question was to analyse a cultural object using one of the theories discussed in class, the object being either a series of Tiger Beer ads, featuring wonderful colorful images of women in exotic locations around the world, or this ad by Starhub, featuring a young family man and the tagline “I am a hub.” So Jose wrote and scribbled and wrote and scribbled for two hours about Nip/Tuck and Starhub until his fingers were sore. Cool exam, don’t you think? I’ve kept the exam paper carefully, and I’ve shown off the exam paper to a lot of people. Teehee.
The next exams, MA2101: Linear Algebra 2, ST3236: Stochastic Processes, and MA2222: Basic Financial Mathematics were far scarier and less enjoyable than my English modules, but they turned out… well, let’s just say I got through them. Linear Algebra was easier and less of a killer than I thought, Stochastic Processes was just utterly impossible to finish (I was deciding whether to carry on solving a 5x5 matrix with 15 minutes left to go, but decided to skip it and focus on other questions that got me stumped), and Financial Mathematics was just as unfinishable and it totally required calculator-punching speed.
The last exam was EN3249: The Body module, and it turned out OK. English papers are really more enjoyable to answer. This exam asked us to 1) discuss either a given poem or a passage from one of our texts, and 2) to answer one of two questions, discussing identity and mortality in relation to one text. I scribbled as much as I could, discussing J.M. Coetzee’s Age of Iron and how the protagonist, Mrs Curren’s cancerous and dying body simultaneously supports and subverts the parallel between the physical body and the tumultuous state of affairs in apartheid South Africa, and, how Grace Nichols’ Fat Black Woman’s Poems describe how a person is given an identity based on fatness, blackness, and womanhood (woman-ness?). Interesting exam too, although I could never be truly confident as I was the sole Science student brave enough to take a Level 3000 Lit module amongst 30-something Literature majors. (Yes, I’ve said all this before, but allow me to reemphasize, if only for the last time.)
So yep, those were exam days. I officially ended on the 2nd of December, and immediately afterwards a bunch of the Pinoy group headed off to Vivo City to stroll around in the mall and watch Happy Feet! Great way to end the exam season, and the semester as a whole. :)
I didn’t quite expect this to be a long entry devoted to exams, but haha, look what I got. Anyway, let’s just wrap this up then, and I’ll tell more of the fun stuff, including the Barclays Christmas Charity Concert on the 13th at the Esplanade Theatre Studio, this large-scale collaboration with the Singapore Chinese Orchestra in a big Buddhist concert at the Singapore Indoor Stadium (no less than Minister Mentor Lee Kuan Yew was guest of honour), and of course, my Dad and my sister’s visit to Singapore for a few days, before we all flew back home, here in Davao City, the other day.
And oh yeah, one last thing before I close, because there was an apparent leak in the system, the grades are already out! I got mine last week, two weeks before the scheduled release of results on 26th December. Rumor has it that the grades may not be final, and have not been moderated yet to adjust to the bell curve, but many of us think the grades seem fairly accurate. I think so, at least. Bottom line: Although Joseph still has one bad grade, 2 quite bad grades, he has a very good B+, and lo and behold, an A, and thank-you-Lord-I-never-thought-I’d-ever-receive-this, his first A+.
It was the worst of semesters, as I claimed in an earlier entry, and I’m not taking that back. It truly was, physically and emotionally and socially and psychologically, and I am just absolutely pleased, that after all that shit-swimming, it ended well… relatively. All’s well that ends well, I like to think.
