A Better Title

Dear Diary,

I’ve been wondering whether I should blog within this period. It’s only a week to exams in NTU, with my first paper on 2 November…

Last week I went to ACJC Open House with Eddy. It was a trip down the memory lane as I walked through the corridors of the college, meeting teachers and friends and re-living the past two years of my life. With Eddy being introduced to how junior college life in Singapore is like.

Come to think of it, the time I was in ACJC is the best two years in my entire life so far.

I had good friends.

I had (rather) good teachers.

I had a good life.

I mean, it isn’t everyday that I actually enjoy going to school.

To me then, especially the period closer towards exams like the Promotional Exams, Preliminary Exams, and the ‘A’ Levels, the school was my life. Not just the studies. But also the school environment itself, together with the people inside.

I still remember how I, together with a lot of others, stayed back till the security guards chased us out, in the process bonding new or strengthening existing friendships. Together we sort of informally formed the “Void Deck Muggers”, so called because we ‘mugged’ (worked extra hard) in the void deck of ACJC, only going home to sleep and come back to school the following day.

I still remember how my class went through tutorials and lectures together. Probably the thing that I’d miss most is the fact that the classes (groups in university term) are fixed from the start of JC till the end. This thing doesn’t happen in university, with probably groups changing every semester. This fixed class concept allows the members to be closer together, as I obviously miss right now. So far I haven’t felt the closeness with anyone that I felt in JC.

Another thing about ACJC is that most of the people speak English when they’re with foreigners. No offense is meant to the Singaporean Chinese; it’s not that we don’t appreciate your culture. It’s just that some of us foreigners would really love to go together with the group. And it’s pretty hard to actually click in the group if we don’t speak the same language. Oh and no, I don’t mean that we foreigners always speak English either; we do speak in our languages too. I was just thinking that it would be great if all of us can be together at times.

Another difference between JC and university life is that you actually know your tutors (and your tutors know you) much much much better in JC. With more contact time, this is expected. Which is why I can come back to ACJC, and actually feel as if I’m home. I haven’t experienced such thing yet in university…

And of course, Co-Curricular Activities (CCAs) is probably a completely different thing here in university. We call it Extra-Curricular Activities (ECAs) here by the way. In JC, you can actually form a good friendship when your in a CCA, especially if you’re in a small CCA like I was last time. Some of my best friends actually come from Spectra, a CCA I was a member of in JC. In university, some time we don’t even know the other members of the committee we work with! Some of us only join the ECA for the sake of points, which is used to determine whether you can get a place in the hostel in the following year. Which is not a very good thing in my opinion. It’s pretty stupid pursuing something that you don’t really enjoy!

I can go on and on with the list of why I still prefer JC life compared to university. But I also realise that it’s useless if I’m stuck in JC forever. Life must go on. So in my case, it shall.

Hmm… I still have a few issues I’d like to type here, but my eyes are barely open now. So see ya later!

Can’t get enough of JC life,

bcc

PS: Keep on forgetting… The Stuff bar (a.k.a. the sidebar) is now back up, including a new feature called ‘Now Playing’ which contains the latest song currently playing in my Winamp (updated real-time except when Winamp is stopped, in which case it will only show “Not Playing Right Now” an hour after the last song is played). [Technical stuff: The loading time of the main page may be a little bit slower at times since this feature requires me to use PHP. Contact me if you want the code.]

This entry was posted on Saturday, October 30th, 2004 at 5:06 am and is filed under General. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.