Choosing to drown in the deep end

I’ve this backside-itchy disorder that I can’t shake off.

Knowing full well that I don’t know any of all those statistical models and that there’s no one around who can (or cares to) help me with it or even appreciate the effort, I’ve decided to go ahead and try to figure it out myself anyway, simply because “that’s how it should be done, theoretically.”

Naturally, theoretical stuff don’t go very well with the practicalities of cruel reality. All the unfamiliar problems of insufficient or unreliable data and messy numbers followed (not surprisingly, they never seem to trouble the textbook examples). Together with it came the constant pressure to produce results, to show something, which comes in the way of fully understanding how the model works and confirming if it’ll even work. “Welcome to the corporate workstyle,” I tell myself, “fight fire without knowing if it’s the right fire extinguisher you’re using.”

Then came a new intern today, someone who seems to still remember something from the business processes course (which I unfortunately, have not taken). A conversation began with the borrowed book from school I was struggling to understand, and it eventually led to the model I was attempting to apply. “Oh, but you need the alpha, beta and gamma.”, he said. I thought, “Finally! OMG, he knows this stuff!”, so a discussion followed and he suggested some methods.

Damn it feels good to finally be able to get some feedback about what I’m doing and learn something about it. At least there’s some validation and value-adding, instead of trying to explain to them what a random number is and how excel is able to generate it for you.

I have a bad feeling about full-time work. Learning on the job with no one to discuss with sure is shitty stuff, especially when you have the full set of responsibilities that comes with the full paycheck you get. For a while I thought I’d prefer working. Suddenly, I feel like just staying in school.

Life’s been good to me

In the midst of all the frustrations of working with some cranky people this summer term, I’ve made some good friends.

Kind and real people -

Care enough to worry about deadlines and exams, then crazy enough to instigate a spontaneous shopping session.

Righteous enough to stand up for others, yet honest enough to talk behind the backs of people who talk behind the backs of people.

Gay Happy enough to shower others with random hugs and kisses, powered by bursts of energy generated from stress.

Silly enough to be more nervous about my job interview than myself, and then more excited about me getting the job than myself. (The innocent offer of a jacket in an untimely rain – touched.)

Such angels with an earthly twist, what more could I ask for?

Waddling in the baby pool

I should be running statistics and doing analysis for my marketing project. But it’s just not going forward.

It’s extremely irritating when nothing concrete can be done about it, because all the statistics that I would need to make any meaningful conclusion from the survey results is just too postgraduate-difficult for lousy undergrads like us – it’s not taught. Then why are we doing this? All the guesswork and intuitive findings are getting on my nerves.

Pseudo science doesn’t work except maybe in sensational journalism. Getting a feel of the real work from projects like this doesn’t even let us lick the surface. It’s licking a glass panel covering the surface of the real work, making believe that something good comes out of this.

Sometimes, university feels like a whole big smokery. Application-based learning means practice for smoking your boss. Academic learning of abstract theories means learning keywords from big concepts that we can’t understand completely so as to sound professional.

We should either have abstract theories forced down our throats in school, or be thrown into the deep end at work. We may choke or drown, but at least we’ll get the nutrition and learn to swim.

Grade Complications

Idealistically, project work should facilitate self-learning and mutual learning. But what happens when grades come in to complicate matters?

When put between giving others a chance to perform and letting the more capable person represent the group in a presentation, someone said, “I don’t want to jeopardise my grades.”

It is infuriating to hear a comment like that. After all, dismissing an unpolished presenter and depriving him of a chance to learn and gain experience for fear of jeopardising grades just seem too unacceptably selfish.

On the other hand, giving others a chance comes at the expense of multiple practices and guidance from the more experienced members. Considering that the project makes up only a small percentage of the grades, is it worth the time spent? Does it warrant jeopardising everyone’s grades and wasting everyone’s time?

Such is a tough decision to make, all at the same time not wanting to hurt feelings. 

Chai tea gives you wings

Note to self: Never accept an offer to an unknown caffeinated beverage after 7pm at night unless you’re planning to party late into tomorrow’s night.

Zero caffeine immunity, tendency to sleep late and 8 hours of sweet sleep the night before is a disaster when combined with a tea in the late afternoon and chai tea after 7pm.

Yesterday night found me tossing and turning in bed, clocking barely 3 hours of light sleep and waking up with unfamilar alertness. Clueless as to what caused the insomnia, I added an unnecessary canned coffee in the morning and it kept me wide awake way into the afternoon.

A little googling taught me that Chai tea is made with black tea, the tea with the highest caffeine level that should technically still contain less caffeine than a cup of coffee. I must have been drinking the wrong coffee all my life.

In any case, I’ve found my beverage of choice for those weeks of deadlines.

Nutty Professor

Halfway through today’s marketing lesson (coincidentally, after watching several Energizer commercials), my professor’s presentation controller ran out of power.

Frustrated after several failed tries to work the device, he said, “This thing [the controller] has a built-in indicator, and it says that the battery is… zero.”

Then he muttered under his breath, “You know, there’s a trick for this.”

So in the middle of the class, he took out the battery and threw them on the floor. Then, he squatted down at the center of the seminar room and threw the battery on the floor repeatedly.

Satisfied with his ingenious trick, he replaced the battery, “Hah.. and now…”, *click click click*, “it’s still not working.”

How Often Do You Stop to Think?

Time: 8.10pm
Venue: On bus 56, on the way home.

Unable to take a nap now, what I mostly do on the bus, because I’ve to change to another. Somehow, though the body’s programmed to identify “home” even when asleep, it is not programmed to identify “stop to change bus”.

Today, I bought this notepad, not for the purpose of “bus blogging”, but to take down some notes because I’m asked to go for work pretty last minute. But, I’m a person of convenience. Since the pen and paper is within reach, I just took them out and vandalize on these few sheets of bleached-to-bright-white paper.

I plopped my ass on the first seat of this bus, with only the words “grumpy”, “irritable”, “exhausted”, “stressed”, “tired”, “PMS-y” on my mind. Then urgently made a few calls to settle the air rifle training camp tomorrow. (An old man just boarded this bus, pressing his chest to the card scanner to scan the EZ-link card in his shirt pocket. There are lazier people than me around.)

The urgent need to rant hit me. What better way to rant than to write? And rather than waiting to get home for internet or risk screwing up my wireless internet access by trying to randomly connect to wireless networks, I picked up this pen and paper within reach.

This post should not degenerate to nothing but a rant about my day and a chronological record of my bus trip. So I should stop here, and write what I wanted to write about. After all, I wrote the title to this post first.

Can this post be considered “stopping to think”? Stopping while traveling at 50km/h on this rickety bus.

- break, alight to change bus -

What prompted me to write about this, was one question my prof asked me today.

Prof: “What are you planning to do this coming summer?”
Me: (shifty eyes) “I’m applying for internships.”
Prof: “So what areas are you looking to?”
Me: (…)

Prof was very nice to offer his help, suggesting that I drop him an email so he could help me arrange something. What struck me was that I haven’t took the time to seriously consider what I wanted to do, and someone else was already offering to help me.

I knew full well that this weekend was the only time left for me to decide and send in the applications, with at least 2 bank internships’ deadlines being next Wednesday. But so are the half a dozen reports and homework and all the studying I need to do because I’m seriously behind time.

So, it’s time to stop and think.

And I’m not thinking about the right stuff. I’m only wondering how often you will really get to stop and think, while

- pause, board 2nd bus -

(“走进一点，来，麻烦帮忙走进一点”)
Translation: “Move inside, please help, move inside”, the bus driver said as I packed myself into the bus filled to the steps.

(Can’t write properly while hanging on to a pole in a crowded bus.)

—

So that ended experiment one of “blogging” on a bus trip.

Here’s to pick up from where I left in the notepad.

How often do you really get to stop and think, think about what you want and plan how you are going to achieve it? It is getting quite frustrating, how everyday I’m just fighting fire and meeting deadlines. You know there are more important things to do, you know you need to sit down and figure things out a bit. But right now, it’s living by the day, and any plans for tomorrow just seems to get disrupted and I’ll end up being derailed to do something else.

How I dread my phone and my emails now. They are the biggest stress creators in modern life. Yet, I just can’t turn the phone off, or not check my email accounts for more than 2 hours (other than when I’m sleeping). How do you deal with that anxiety when the email server is down for more than 5 minutes? Or that itch you can’t scratch when you realize you’ve left your phone at home or it’s running out/completely out of battery? It is ironic that whenever the email is down and the phone is out, I just can’t concentrate on doing anything, suddenly unsure, as though my schedule has become dictated by the people who set fire on my work desk.

Trying to find the time, and the mood for that matter, to plan beyond a month seems impossible. How do you draw up plans for digging a new well, when your eyebrows have caught fire and you have banged your head on the wall one too many times to put the fire out?

Perhaps it’s this lack of thinking, and lack of planning, that everyone seems to hate their job – they just take whatever’s available; and why they hate their spouse – they just marry the person they wake up to one morning.

No wonder life sucks.

But today, I spoke to this person so unusually happy with her life when you just can’t see what’s there to be so happy about.

She’s about my age (slightly younger) and not as educated as most of the people I know, meaning she has difficulty adding up the sums for a transaction that involved a few products with different quantities and a discount. But she’s such a bubbly, happy and enthusiastic young girl, unlike the zombies I see around in school.

She is a full-time shopkeeper at a store, her first job. Everyday, she sits in the store alone for long hours, her solitude broken occasionally by a customer who wanders in.

Me: “Don’t you get bored alone here?”
She: “A little. But I can pop by the neighbors and talk to them. Hahaha…“
Me: “So you are very close?”
She: “Yeah! Hahaha… We’re quite close.”
Me: “Do you have internet connection?”
She: “No. Hahaha…”
Me: (pretty horrified by her job by now) “So what do you do all day?”
She: “Oh, I can make the [products] look like they’re asking the customers to buy them! Hahaha… Like arrange them, the ones on the shelves, in the buckets… Hahaha… I can replenish the supplies when they are out! Hahaha…“
Me: “Do you like [products]?”
She: “Yeah! I like them! Hahaha… Do you? Hahaha…“
Me: “Er… ok.”
She: “Hahahahahahaha…“

I couldn’t understand. If I were her, I would expect myself to be furiously planning for the next job. So I went on asking.

Me: “Have you thought of what would be your next job?”
She: “No! Hahaha… I like working here, and the boss is very nice. Hahaha…“

Ha Ha Ha.
She is so happy it makes you jealous. And it makes me feel like a bastard, a huge moronic showoff when I tried to teach her how to do her sums.

She is so much better than us in so many ways. Working 66 hours a week and being so happy and enthusiastic about her work she can remember the names of the hundreds of products in the store (as well as the prices and many of the product codes) that I could barely even tell apart. Besides, her job isn’t even cool or exciting. She doesn’t travel around, meet people, learn new things. Her world is pretty much confined to that shop.

It feels horrible, that us, with more opportunities and luck in life, are complaining about every darn thing. School, applying for jobs, not getting the job and the work when we get the job. Even food. And we get to choose what we want to eat and where. She gets her meals 6 days a week from the friendly janitor who helps her buy her lunch.

But she doesn’t need to plan. We do. Well, at least I do. Because I don’t know what I want and I don’t like what I might end up doing if I don’t plan.

I wonder if needing to plan is a pain or a privilege.

Overheard

Yesterday afternoon, as I was sitting at the table with the Bloomberg terminals (possibly one of the few seats left in the library), a group of guys noisily approached the machine beside mine to get some data for their project.

While logging into Bloomberg, Mr. Well-informed decided to update his friend on his latest discovery around school.

Well-informed dude: “Hey, do you know the QF students have an entire room of Bloomberg terminals to themselves?”

(Me: We do? Oh, this I gotta hear!)

Unsuspecting friend: “Really! Where?”

Well-informed dude: “At the concourse, where SOA is. It’s an entire room of computers like this one (points at the Bloomberg terminal in front of him), with 2 screens!”

Unsuspecting friend: “How did you know?”

Well-informed dude: “I walked past and saw it. The door says ‘QF Computer Lab”. It’s so unfair! The QF students have an entire room full of Bloomberg terminals to themselves, but it’s empty most of the time! While the entire school has to fight for these 2 terminals in the library.”

(Me: rofl!)

Well-informed dude: “It’s really A COMPUTER LAB.”

No doubt about that, it is a computer lab, with 20 computers connected to 2 monitors each. But not all computers with 2 screens are Bloomberg terminals, idiot.

Wrong-side-of-bed Day

Feels like I woke up in a different world today.

Turned off my phone’s alarm twice, and both alarms were set for the same time,

A girl sitting near me in the library had her phone pressed to her ear playing out loud some chinese pop song…on loop.

Saw a girl wearing slippers 2 sizes too small, walking around with half her heel on the ground.
Another dressed in 70s chic – checkered shirt tied at waist over tight black top and tight black pants.
And a guy in a polo tee sewed out of colourful rectangles of cloth.
(Was it all that guitar loaded 70s rock I was listening to before I slept last night?)

Now as I sit in the library killing time, the girl sitting opposite me has suddenly began smiling (ridiculously) to herself.

Re: The Result of Spoon-Feeding

My comment for The Result of Spoon Feeding:

“I like the slogan “Teach less, Learn more.”

Teachers should really be there to instill interest in the subject and facilitate learning. It is not so much about knowledge transfer whether on the foundational or advanced level. Worse, it is not about preparing the students for exams. Although that may be the expectations of Singaporean parents on teachers, and the responsibility that Singaporean teachers shoulder, that is, in my opinion, not the spirit of teaching.

I’ve had teachers who inspired me into being so interested in the subject I google for information outside of the textbook on the topics I learn in class. I even pick books related to the subject for leisure reading. That’s what I call a real teacher.

Granted, such teachers are few and far between. A failed school attempt at instilling independent learning may not mean that all is lost. At least, it shows that they’re recognizing it, just like what the slogan “Teach Less, Learn More.” implies.

As much as I would love teachers who could instill interest, it is understandable that instilling interest in students is extremely difficult to do. Despite many attempts and much enthusiam in doing so, not all teachers succeed.

Teachers are also in a constant independent learning process.”