The First Week Review

I am sitting here at the desk in my room, dressed in the sweatiest clothes I have had in half a year. Two library books - a collection of essays by David Foster Wallace and a primer on theater critique - lie untouched in my bag, which is, in turn, flung at a corner under the table by my feet. My bed is clean, but is currently a yellow sprawl of plastic bags and wallet and soiled clothes and other little things like earbuds and cup holders (cup-holders!?) that I must've left while on the way out to do the dishes.

My dishes, sorry. I have to take care of them. They belong to me. Only me. No one else.

God, university life is different.

I know I should have written about Singapore and NUS and life here long ago, but a lot of things have happened in the past 3 weeks, things that I want to talk to you about, but don't know where to start. And I suppose the other partial reason is this little thing called writer's block, in which I want to produce the most wonderful, word-perfect essay on the first week of University anyone's ever produced, and this - naturally - prevents me from sitting down and organizing my thoughts, and letting them flow from head to hand.

So yes, I know, I'm a perfectionist idiot. Which is why I'm writing this now - exhausted and hot and sweaty I am - because that part of my brain that screams INFERIOR SENTENCE DELETE DELETE DELETE is woozy and sweat-drunk and I can write whatever I want without it spontaneously combusting into tiny little shrapnel chips that ricochet around in my head and leave little trails of grey mush. Which isn't a very good sentence. But just - you know - just testing.

(And also - my judogi is in the middle of a wash cycle now, so I have to wait for that to finish before I can go to sleep. And I haven't bathed. And my clothes stink to the high heavens. Didn't I tell you that University life is different?)

It's different in other surreal little ways too, like this one night morning I was walking around, 3 am, to pick up an indemnity form from Val - who printed it for me - and it was dark and quiet and there were no people around, and then I walked past this project room and through a tiny sliver between the curtains I saw a group of 8 boys clustered around a table playing DOTA. No sound at all. Just the occasional swear-word, and even then only audible right outside the window. Eight frowning faces, eight flashing computer screens, and the velvet dark of an early morning.

But anyway. I'm getting ahead of myself. I'm not going to talk about Singapore - or about NUS, for that matter - not in this post. I'll save that for another day. What I do want to talk about, however, is the first week of lecture, and my thoughts on the classes I'm taking this semester. That first week just finished today, in the sense that last Monday was a public holiday, and so I only sat for those missed lectures this afternoon.

Now all NUS students have to take five modules (or subjects) per sem, and we have to bid for them through a pretty complicated auction system called CORS, which works somewhat like the system Google designed for Adwords - but with protection, appeals, and an idiosyncratic currency system. But it's not necessary to explain that for this post. I'm taking five modules this semester, and being in the School of Computing means that I only have to bid for two, seeing as three are given to me by the faculty at the start of term. So, here they are, with my thoughts, in order:

CS1101 Programming Methodology is this heavy module that works as an introduction to programming. The lectures are all small sectional classes, conducted in little groups in computer labs, and my teacher is this guy called Tan Tiow Seng, who did a hilarious introductory talk at the beginning of our orientation week about Alumni and the School of Computing (in which he called everyone in the faculty crazy horses). I like him, and I think the module's going to be an interesting one, even if it is a little tough.

CS1231 Discrete Structures is a math course, and is intertwined with the programming things taught in CS1101. It's probably the hardest course I'm taking this semester. I am, apparently, really lucky this year, because I have a French lecturer called Stefane Bresson, and he's nothing short of brilliant. He actually makes math interesting, and as an added bonus he speaks in a funny French accent that's a breath of fresh air after all the Singlish you hear on a grating day-to-day basis.

CS1105 Computing and Society is to computing students what Pengajian Am was to Form 6. As in PA, we study all sorts of amazing, mindblowing things like ethics and computers and how computers have changed society and how Facebook really sucks because like so your boss can google you and find your Facebook profile and add you and then browse through all your drunk-like-siaw photos, and thus proceed to fire you after having weird gay dreams that somehow always involve you and a bottle of scotch.

SSA3201 Singapore English-Language Theatre is an SS (Singapore Studies) module, which is simply a category of modules that all NUS students are required to take. I think we have a Malaysian equivalent too, in our own universities, called - err - Malaysian Studies. But anyway. I chose this one because I figured that since I needed to complete an SS sooner or later, why not choose a module that was in a field that I liked? And I think I made the right choice - it's really challenging, in a way that Malaysian high school subjects aren't ... and that's probably because original thought and justified interpretation is the standard to which we are all supposed to work at. And our lecturer is a diva. A male diva. He rocks. I was late to his first lecture (alarm was set to 8.30 pm, woke up at 11.55, lecture started at 12; swore: shitshitshitshit ... and then I got lost) and he's really quite the personality. Term assignment? 10-50 page essay, on a past year exam question of my choice.

NM1101E Communications, New Media and Society was the lecture I took this afternoon, and boy, was it jam-packed. The student body spilled out of the chairs and onto the theatre stairs, and on the floor at the back of the hall. I took this subject out of interest, to see what other things I could learn about digital content, and now I'm beginning to wonder about that decision. The first lecture seemed too ... fun. The teacher in charge's American, and she's got this wicked sense of humour (she tells us that our finals will be laugh-out-load-Reader's-Digest-joke-section funny, because she wants us to laugh in the exam hall ... and anecdotal accounts on the web from last year actually confirm this), and she also believes in involving the whole audience in whatever session she's doing. We were promised documentary films, and student participation, and these things called Techno Breaks where we'd stop whatever we were doing and get up and do some fun activity - which, today, was a game designed to gauge our media consumption habits. It was crazy-assed fun. A little too fun. Like a party rather than a class. Which is frightening, to say the least.

And so but then I need to go check on my laundry now, but I'll write soon. About Singapore, about the University, and about the people I've met. Till then.