Updates

It’s been a month, and this post is long overdue. Exams are over, results are in, and summer school has started. So much has happened, but I’ve been so caught up in work for exams, and so tired after, that I just did not feel like blogging.

So, right where I left off then, the rest of my exams went by without incident, and I managed to pull through ok. I was told that in the Electrical Engineering programme in McGill you get to go through all the toughest courses on offer at McGill. The first proof of that was my introductory course to Java. Even after curving, the class average was a C+, and 25% of the class failed. Yes, that’s right. A quarter of the students got less than 50% overall. And for us engineering students, a pass isn’t sufficient – you need at least 55% or higher. I just can’t wait for what lies ahead.

But that’s over with, and I had 10 days before summer school started, so I spent most of my time packing up my room, and looking for a new apartment for next year. In all, I looked at almost 10 places, and I’ve managed to find one that I’m really happy with. I’ve decided to live alone because I’ve had enough of the community-living business, and also because I’ve never really had a room of my own, except for the 6 months after I completed NS. The lease begins in June, after summer school, and I’ll have to furnish the place on my own, which sounds like fun.

Right now, summer school takes up the first half of the day, four days a week. It’s effectively condensing 4 months of work into 4 weeks, but since I have only one course, it seems manageable so far. Midterms are next week, and finals are at the end of the month.

Back home, Singapore recently held it General Elections, and for the first time, overseas voting was allowed. There were a grand total of 8 overseas polling stations in 6 countries worldwide, and overseas votes were only counted AFTER election results were announced. While I understand that because of the number of votes and the margin of victory for the PAP, overseas votes wouldn’t affect the outcome of the elections, I believe that only including them in the total vote tally after the elections serves only to undermine their value. It’s more about the principle behind it than anything.

There’s been lots of election commentary available online, and I do believe that these elections have only served to highlight how slanted the ST’s coverage of local politics can be. An insider’s view is available here. Cherian George has some really good stuff on his blog, and so does Yawning Bread, Mr Wang and SG Rally, to name but a few. The elections seemed pretty exciting this time round, and I wish I was back in Singapore, just so that I could attend some rallies even though my GRC was not contested.

Meanwhile, there is quite a significant challenge in Canada regarding the independence and impartiality of our judicial system which could have significant ramifications. The issue is well covered at by Yawning Bread here, and by Mr Wang here. There is also an article in the IHT which I feel is pretty balanced here.

I have yet to get my ticket back home, which I should be doing in the next week. Looking forward to all the food when I get back, and to meeting up with my friends and seeing my family again. I guess I’ll end here, because I don’t really have much else to say, but I should be blogging more often now that I have the time.

Getting it off my chest

It's smack in the middle of exams, and I have a programming final that I'm not prepared for tomorrow, but I just have to blog now. I am pissed with McGill Admin. Very very pissed. Allow me to explain.

I had my first final today, it was for Calculus, and it was held in the McConnell Engineering Building. The way it works is that you're told what building your final is held, and you go there on the day itself to find out where exactly the room your exam is. Rooms are allocated by surname, because some rooms are not big enough to fit all the students. So I go to school half an hour early to find out that the administration has brilliantly only allocated rooms for people with surnames up to the letters "Lud". So those of us whose surnames come after those letters all go to the biggest venue, and ask the invigilator there where we are supposed to go. And she has no clue.

Nevermind that, she asks us to wait, and she'll let us in, IF she has space. So there's half the course waiting outside your exam room, 15 minutes before the exam, and you've been told that we have ABSOLUTELY NOWHERE to go to take the exam, and all you do is ask us to wait.

Why can't you do the proactive thing and help us find out where we're supposed to go? You are an invigilator after all. And to add to that, you have this brilliant idea of asking the students, who are waiting to take the exam, to go to FDA 6, and speak to the people there to find out where we are supposed to go. You tell us this at 1:55pm, after we have been standing there for 10 minutes. Couldn't you have told us earlier? To add to that, there are 2-3 invigilators in your room, doing absolutely nothing, seeing how the exams have already been placed on the tables, and you can't even show us where this fucking room is? Don't you think, that as the people sitting for an exam, the least you could do for us is to speak to whoever organised the damn thing? No, instead we have to fix something that the admin messed up on, 5 minutes before our exam.

Maybe I'm being hard on the invigilators, but, they weren't doing anything, the exam hadn't started, and there were 3 of them in the room. Surely, at least one could have gone to FDA 6 to report the situation. Or at least show one of us where the bloody room was. And, we came 15 minutes before to let you know, and you had to wait till 5 minutes before the damn thing to tell us to go to FDA 6.

Going further up chain, I fail to see how the admin failed to realise that yes, people's surnames DO begin with letters after L. Let's do our ABC's shall we? M,N,O,P,Q,R,S,T,U,V,W,X,Y,Z. That's 14 letters, MORE THAN HALF the alphabet. How could you not notice? And if you did have the list of students and the course enrollment, wouldn't you have realised that there was a shortfall in the number of spaces allocated?

I had to keep all that in me for 3 hours as I took my exam, so it feels good to get it all out.

Alright, back to studying now.

Exams

I am royally screwed. Exams end in two weeks (no, not begin. Exams begin a week from now), and I haven't even started studying yet. And I still have assignments due. Shit. Am also feeling almost burnt out, because since reading week (3rd week of Feb), I have not had a single weekend where I could completely unwind. My profs like to have assignment deadlines on Fridays, Sundays and Mondays, and they like to release new assignments the moment old ones are due i.e programming - assignment due Monday at 11:55pm, new assignment up Tuesday 0:00am. Yay! My thoughtful profs gave me a whole 5 minutes of rest.

Since the fourth week of Feb, I've had to write 2 papers, complete 6 physics assignments and 3 lab reports, 3 programming assignments, 3 calculus assignments, take 2 midterms, write 1 in-class essay, give an oral presentation and come up with a business proposal. On top of reading for political science, which of course I did not do because I had no time. All this on top of going to class. In 6 weeks. I didn't even realise it was that much until I wrote it all down just now.

What the hell is wrong with McGill Admin anyway? Why can't we have just 1 week between the end of classes and the start of exams? Who in their right minds has classes up till the day before exams start? No time to think about all that right now. Time to haul ass, get my assignments done, and start studying, before I collapse from exhaustion on the 20th, only to send myself back to the grind on May 1.

And I remember being told JC would be the toughest time of my academic life. No way in hell does it compare to this.