Thoughts on NUS

As of press time I have one major math chapter to revise (being already lost, despite it being only the 3rd week of school) and a programming assignment to complete, and so I really shouldn't be sitting down with my mind switched on write and my browser opened to Blogger. But no matter. I'm setting aside Friday nights as writing time, and the weather is cool and the skies are grey this evening (plus there's the small matter of having just woken from a fantastic 1 hour nap) and so write I shall. The following are a collection of my thoughts on NUS.

The National University of Singapore, placed 30th in the world and home to a combined student population of about 29,305 (with the international student body at 34%, or 9880) is old and new and beautiful and scattered atop what feels like the hilliest bloody place on the whole island-nation of Singapore.^[1] The Engineering faculty, for instance, is built on a slope, and apart from the rising greens and the shady trees that lead up to its buildings (of which that green rise is admittedly beautiful and possibly the only good thing about aforementioned slope) suffers from the chronic idiosyncrasy of having different floors on different blocks that are linked to each other via suspended walkways, and so - as Tay describes it: ".. bloody confusing wan! When you call somebody and they say they're on the seventh floor, you have to ask them which block they're in, because the sixth floor on some block is the seventh floor on another block ..." and so when people from other faculties so dare to venture into the engineering department they very often get lost.



But NUS is itself old, and the buildings themselves come in all sorts of shapes and sizes. I would be hard-pressed to find a unifying word to describe the whole of campus: Hodgepodge, perhaps. Or Stoned. The newer buildings are fantastic glass and steel structures of modern design and build (i.e: the University Hall, the Yong Siew Toh Conservatory of Music), but the older ones look like a slightly brighter more academic version of Civic Centre/Hopoh (read: nostalgic, or old or, less kind, this: ugly), with small, glazed-white tiles on the walls and brown slats underfoot and dusty metal-framed picture windows that you see only in half-empty barbershops in Old Kuching. The gardens are beautiful. The sculptures are breathtaking and clever and mostly relevant to whichever faculty or portion of campus you find them in ^[2], and the trees are large and shady and inviting, like you have to sit under them and read a book, or have a picnic, or something.



The student body in NUS is diverse, and I have met more people from more places around the world in the past one month then I have in all my life in Kuching. We have Mauritians and Indians, Koreans and PRC Chinese, the Vietnamese and the Burmese and Scottish and German and Dutch, and they all mostly stick to their own skin profiles i.e.: the Whites stick together and go out clubbing on weekends, the Indians move around in groups (always in groups) and the PRC Chinese walk around in twos and threes, like they're sick of close-proximity groupthink or something. And so it's quite weird to see a Chinese boy sitting with a group of Indians during dinner - which is what I do, and they all bombard me with questions like "what is the meaning of la?" and share with me their stories of home - "the place where I'm from in India is known for two things: tea and terrorists" - and we share with each other the best places to go for Indian food and whether it's authentic or not and how the briyani here is nothing like as compared to back home in wherever.

I've come to realize, though, that friendship in University isn't so much built around your class or where you sit in class as it is around what co-curricular activities you do, or what modules you take for a particular semester. I don't have a close circle of friends; what I do have at the moment more resembles a network than anything else: Hoang, who is a Vietnamese and explains to me complex math concepts in CS1231; Valentino, who is Indonesian and loves lit and sits with me in theatre; Keng Wee and Woong Yong, who are Singaporeans and fellow orientation-group members in 0-week and who now only see each other (and me) on Friday, for 1105, and Shiv and Shailendra and Sudanshu and Chinab and Godham and Sriharsha and countless others who are Indians and are friends because we all love to talk.^[3]

Then there are the friends that I feel most comfortable with, like curling up with a loved book by the fire, and these are mostly the ones I've met in Kuching during sec school. There's Tay and Joash, and Ameline and Val, and Zakil ... and it's meeting Zakil on campus that I find most amazing and cool and compelling a story to relate to you here: It was in the afternoon. I was tired. I was on the NUS internal shuttle bus, and I had my face against the cold relief of the glass windows, eyes shut, when I heard Zakil's voice. Now I've known Zakil since Form 2 - we went to tuition together - and the imagined reality of hearing an old friend's voice while on the bus back to my room in NUS is like finding a snowflake in Indonesia while on the way to milk your cows. Zakil is here for Medicine, and we've explored vast portions of NUS together already ... finding - amongst other things - military labs and aquariums filled with exotic fish and viral research centres tucked away deep in the bowels of the university campus.



Studying in NUS is again quite different from what you'd expect it to be. Disregard the top-30 world ranking and understand that NUS is a research hub ... and academicians actually flock here for the funding and support provided by the Singaporean government. The one condition that they have is that they are forced to teach. This means that while you have access to what are arguably the top minds in this part of the world (and beyond, even), you more often than not have men and women who are better suited for research than they are for teaching. I can't confirm this: all my teachers this first semester are wonderful. My seniors in the School of Computing, however, complain that their modules are dry and boring, and that - while professionally excellent - their professors are far from the ideal teachers they might've asked for. This is a small issue: save America and Oxbridge, I don't think teaching excellence and world class research can be found in that many universities in this part of the world, though not for reasons that I pretend to understand. ^[4]

But it's a curious fact that rankings and meta-critical thought about rankings disappear when you're finally here and attending lectures in the university itself: nobody really cares what NUS is ranked as on the world stage, and Singaporeans never really pay lip-service to this fact. To the average Singaporean, NUS is where you go to if you're bright but you can't afford Oxford/Cambridge/Harvard/MIT, and the well-to-do Singaporean's attitude towards local universities bear a certain shadowy resemblance to the way upper-middle-class Malaysians treat our own local public universities. I can only guess at this: I suppose when you take for granted what is readily available to you, you begin to look at bigger things at the expense of local education: like Cambridge Massachusetts, for instance. But I shall not pretend to understand everything about this.

One other thing that I won't pretend to care about: to tell you that all this argument and thought about university ranking actually matters to me, because it does not: university life is oddly fulfilling and challenging and tough, but unlike anything else I've ever experienced before. A bunch of us were lounging around in the cluster corridor a couple of hours ago and the one thing we agreed upon - definitively, that is - was that Form 6 is nothing compared to the first sem of university - or, at least, the first sem of university in NUS. The myth that it is is just that - a myth.

More on that some other day.



^1. An Indian friend of mine, in Engineering, tells me that NUS is aptly named: the National University of Stairs. He isn't kidding. ↩

^2. Except one outside the School of Design and Environment, which looks like a collection of stony spires set out on a small patch of lawn, some of which are collapsed and sad-looking and lying like dead logs on the grass. ↩

^3. Shiv I met in debate, and he's on scholarship in Engineering and very bright and a real pleasure to debate with. ↩

^4. Take all this with a pinch of salt: I don't believe university rankings are the be-all and the end-all of tertiary education, and I don't recommend you do too. For instance, an education in a unranked liberal-arts college in America followed by a professional postgraduate degree is still arguably better than professional training in the best ranked university in Asia. ↩

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.