NOTE: This was a post migrated from my previous Ghost blog. If links don’t work and you would really like to see it, it’s probably posted somewhere in this blog.

It’s been a hell of a five years spent at the National University of Singapore and I’m glad to say I am finally a graduate. Frankly I’m more glad about getting out of the place rather than having a degree - it’s been half a decade.

Why five? I started out in the Life Sciences, enthusiastic and full of hopes in the promises of Science… Which was not to be. In my second year I did a fun-sized research project - they call it UROPS - and fortunately or unfortunately for me, I discovered I had a moral disdain for it, and I also discovered pragmatic reasons why pursuing the Sciences would suck; thankfully in the process, I also found my joy for creating stuff. It started with a problem I had of spending hours to find suitable PCR primers for my gene of interest, it was a bitch, so I developed a software to do it in minutes and the satisfaction of doing that led me to join the School of Computing in my third year.

Never looked back since.

My journey in Computer Science was amazing - and for me it was more enabling than educational: I didn’t do particularly well academically, but I learnt a lot that I will take with me for the rest of my life. As I like to say, it’s not what you learn, but how what you learn changes you that matters, and being in Computer Science (perhaps I may be biased) has taught me an invaluable lot of stuff that I believe other faculties would not have been able to. Computers are extensions of our minds, and all software/apps are essentially someone’s thoughts and intentions put into computer understandable code. Moving along those lines, Computer Science is essentially learning how to think.

To give a little note of acknowledgement to the knowledge, skills and way of thinking I acquired during my education, what I learnt led me to have the confidence to found my own tech company, Mooziq, which aims to strengthen local music and empower independent and emerging artistes via an online platform which was to me a culmination of every module I took - data structures to temporarily store information or process it, algorithms to prevent code running in O(n4), database theory to structure data storage, software engineering to actually plan for a complete system of interacting components, security to make sure my platform is not an open book -Mooziq would never have been made without applying all of these snippets of knowledge gained from the multitude of modules I took.

Throughout my university life, I’ve taken the road less travelled and in retrospect, it made all the difference. Looking back, I’m amazed I even managed to graduate on time before the government put a stop to my educational subsidies (5 years on the dot), and after getting through it, I feel a moral obligation to write a post for those about to walk a path I have before my memory of my experience fails me.

TL;DR? Everything’s going to be alright.

In summary:

1. Don’t go for Orientation
2. Take modules for fun
3. Take classes alone
4. Ditch the Resumé
5. Have a CCA
6. Go for Exchange
7. Find your Passion

1. Don’t go for Orientation

I was never a fan of orientation and I am thankful for being rejected when applying for O-Week the day before it started. In your first year it’s all pretty and you have friends wearing the same t-shirt as you to attend classes together; in your fourth year, generally you lose touch with all your gung-ho buddies less one or two. While it makes life better for the first few weeks/months of school, it doesn’t have as a significant impact on your university life in the way you think it does.

The first few weeks was miserable for me, sitting in classes alone while the rest of the lecture theatre seemed to know each other. However, one semester in, I felt liberated, as will be explained in my next point.

2. Take modules for fun

Having early-game friends means they’ll want to do everything together since everyone’s a newbie and you know, chopsticks break easily alone. You’ll find yourself having to do everything together: have lunch together leh, have dinner together leh, study together la, go out leh, watch movie today together… et cetera, AND most importantly: eh plan next sem classes leh.

If you’re not focused/know what you want out of university, it’s easy to get peer pressured into planning for and taking modules you have no interest in. I had a friend-count of less than 10 when I got past my first semester. In my second semester I took whatever the hell I wanted and found a joy in Sociology. In my fourth, I found my love for coding. Take modules that you find interesting - not your friends, focus on and develop yourself, these are the last 4 (or five) years of your formal education and you do not want to waste it learning something that someone else is interested in. I know a number of people who regret not being able to take some modules because they wanted to take others with friends. Don’t regret, take your modules for fun - ie for yourself.

3. Take classes alone

Adding on to the previous point of taking modules you want to, take classes alone. Taking classes with friends means you get to work with people you’re familiar with. Sounds good, but no one ever got better by being in their comfort zones. As an added advantage, by taking classes alone you get used to expanding your network - and network is king when you come out of school: you’ll never know how to do 100% of the things 100% of the time, and the more people you know, the higher the chance of being able to get things done 100% of the time - at certain costs of course, depending on the strength of your relationship or the thickness of your skin.

There will be frequent project works during your university life, use them to make friends and connections - talking to and knowing how to assert yourself with strangers when needed is a life skill. Not going for orientation inadvertently results in this scenario. I used to be quite seriously introverted to strangers, until I found myself alone in university and it was talk or die.

4. Ditch the Resumé

Some will undoubtedly end up in a resumé chase, doing things for the sake of having it on paper. It’s not easy, it’s not fun, and five years down the road, no one is going to care if you were the president of the biggest club in NUS when you get a CAP of 2.*. It’s not easy juggling responsibilities and unless you’re already excelling, your CAP will drop, I promise. Do it only if you want to, do it to make connections, to expand your network, do it because you enjoy it, just don’t do it for the record - you’ll highly likely do a less-than-optimal job as well.

Also if you’re truly looking to make a serious, meaningful, and impactful change somewhere somehow, you might want to do it outside of the university’s capacity. NUSSU (the NUS Student Union that everyone knows exists yet know not of their operations) has made no significant impact on school policies whatsoever during my five years of student life, despite one or two of the presidents being fairly adequate.

5. Have a CCA

Out of all the people I have met in university, the one group of people that I will probably keep in contact with for no reason at all are those from my CCA (shoutout to y’all if you’re reading). I’m a proud member and ex-logs-head of CAC Amplified - a live music club that used to be ghetto af but which has since relented and become more mainstream after juniors took over.

So, more on why CCA: In university, you ‘choose’ your passion and pursue it professionally. When pursued to the point of professional, things always get dull and boring, defeating the whole ‘passion’ thingy everyone talks about. Having a CCA in an area you’re passionate but not professional about let’s you meet like-passioned peers and do stuff non-professionally in the capacity of friends, which will be an awesome experience once you’re in your third year and if you’ve been with these people from your first. When I look back at my university life, it’s peppered with jams at the god-forsaken CAC clubroom that’s always full of rubbish, sitting in that same clubroom doing an essay or working on some other personal project while someone is banging away on the drums in the studio, preparing for some gig or another - you get the idea.

6. Go for Exchange

Probably one of my few regrets is not being able to go for exchange. I registered for and secured a place to the University of Dundee in my second year. If you’re sharp enough you’d remember I found my way into Computing, which came at the cost of giving up my exchange because I registered for a Faculty Exchange. Had it been a University Exchange (yes, there’s a difference), I would have been able to do my basic SoC modules on exchange.

Although I have not been on the programme, it is something I have not heard anyone regret going for. Some benefits are: 1) your CAP stays still 2) most modules can be mapped, AND you’re graded on an S/U basis 3) accommodation is the cheapest you’ll find for a 4-month (extendable to 7, find your ways) holiday, 4) you get a network that expands to that country you’re going for exchange - remember, network is king once you’re out of school. You’ll also ‘discover’ yourself, although you’ll have to talk to someone who actually went on exchange to find out what that means. I discovered myself in Singapore:

7. Find Your Passion

Easy to say, difficult to achieve, but university is the last time of your life you’ll get to be able to say and do anything you want because you know, ‘academic context’. Try everything, be involved in any field that even mildly interest you, understand what excites you (your next chance is during your mid-life crisis), understand what gets you down (before your mid-life crisis), get totally lost - because it’s only by being lost that you can be found. It’s okay to be Marxist and actually live like you mean it, it’s okay to argue on the merits of Communism and denounce Capitalism, it’s fine to jam every day, okay to drink every night in different hall rooms, it’s alright to write programs using variables named i and j or p and q, you get to wake up at 2 PM, you get to skip any lecture of your desire. The most you’ll get is a low grade instead of a personally addressed “we’re restructuring and we’re sorry” letter.

If there’s one thing I’ve learnt about professors, a large number of them are kid-like radicals despite their serious looks - it’s because they’re subject to much more stress than you: talk to one to find out more - and once you get to know one to any depth, they’re like kids with their expertise being their playground. Take that with a pinch of salt for I can only speak about those I met from Life Science, Sociology and Computer Science (really, they’re all geeks at heart).

University is an amazing place to be in your twenties with the right mindset. Education is not about the scroll you receive on stage after your final year project or it’s accompanying transcript with all the As - it’s about the impressions you leave behind, the friendships you’ve made, the network you’ve created, how the way you think has changed, the skills you’ve learnt that are applicable in life.

While most of what you learn will seem to have no relevance to your life, in the approximate words of a legendary lecturer in School of Computing that I only had the chance of meeting in my last semester: “Look at this deflated balloon, this is you before university. blows air into balloon… This is you at examination time, full of knowledge, lets all the air out… This is you after the examination… But notice the difference, holds up a new deflated balloon, now you’re more flexible and have more capacity than before.”

Let yourself be filled for one last time in your life. Education may be a lifelong journey, but concentrated, focused education with sporadic bursts of boredom and ‘uninspiration’ without having to worry about your next meal, kids or your other half, well, this is your last chance.

Carpe the fuck diem.