It’s been four whole weeks in NUS ever since I returned to school after my “3 weeks” holiday. It’s been quite an adjustment, considering I hadn’t been actively in school since November last year due to my industrial attachment. It’s actually more hectic and busy in school than in attachment, as you continue working when you reach home, and you use your weekends to churn out reports and catch up with work. Come to think of it, I should enjoy work once it starts, even if I have to spend some time occasionally putting in more effort to climb the ladder. I guess, no matter what I do, I should remain optimistic and that will allow me to deliver my best.

Week 4 just simply means that about a third of the semester is gone. Excluding recess and reading week, the semester only has 13 weeks. Just like that, a third of the semester is gone. It is just like how the rest of the 5 semesters in school was. Time moves fast and doesn’t wait for anyone. Very soon it’ll be the recess week, then reading week and then examinations, and the holidays, a happy time for the year 1s to 3s.

It’s a happy time for me too, since I could fully dedicate my time to my FYP during the 1 month holidays. But there won’t be much time for real holidays I suppose, as everything I had worked for in the first three years now lies in the fate of one cruel thing called the Final Year Project, just because it decides whether one achieves his First Class Honours.

I guess I should be happy now, because no matter what, I would at least graduate with a Second Upper Honours in July next year. This whole period for the year 4 is only for making sure my cap maintains above 4.5 (that’s the job of my Technical Electives), and to get at least an A- for Fyp.

I wonder how the journey for me through year 4 will be like. At least I am hopeful and optimistic as of now. I hope I can remain cheerful throughout the whole 8 months till May next year.

On a lighter note, there seems to be something nice happening this semester. Though I still have my own concerns, I’ll see how things goes and balance everything out.

Besides studies, this four weeks saw me going to many career sessions in NUS and outside NUS. I’ve went to listen to Credit Suisse when they came to talk about their company. And BoA Merrill Lynch, Citibank and Barclays with their Operations & Technology talks. Then there’s the Royal Bank of Scotland talk. And last Thursday I went to the Careers @ OCBC.

Careers @ OCBC was the first talk that was held outside campus and in the company itself. I went to Raffles Place to attend the event, and it was really different from the other talks. When I arrived at the 50th storey, it was networking straight from the start. I was expecting to go for talks and then raise questions, but we were thrown straight away to mingle. Some of the OCBC employees were very friendly and came to talk to us immediately after seeing how lost we were.

But one thing that really disappointed me was that I didn’t manage to attend the talk about Operations & Technology because they shifted the timings without telling us properly. The scheduled talk was at 7.30pm. At that time, my friends and I entered the room and the talk was about Consumer Financial Services, which was originally scheduled at 8.30pm. Everything was pushed forward. They probably announced it via the microphone, but the networking event was so noisy it was really chaotic trying to understand what they were saying. Additionally, we were given a tour of the offices (I went to Emerging Businesses), and that was when the talk probably began.

But OCBC seems like a nice place to work in despite not having a Management Associates program for graduates. They only have the MA program for Masters graduates like MBAs. However they do have their internal MA program if you perform well at OCBC. I guess I could take the chance.

There are more career talks coming soon. In the next week, I’ll be going to the BP talk, yes, the petroleum company, as well as Philips. Both are engineering careers. In the future there’ll be DBS, Morgan Stanley, Barclays, BoA Merrill Lynch etc that are coming. I guess this semester would see me being busy with interviews too.

And the Japanese lesson has just gone into week 3. The sensei was very amusing today. This week was teacher’s day, and the previous class yesterday gave him a paper white tie, White Label, cause he always jokes about wearing his Burberry Black Label tie.

And today one of the practice questions involving us forming a sentence that says “I have written the name here”, and sensei brought out a piece of paper folded into 2 like a book, with text on the front reading “Death Note” and then he says its better not to write the name inside.

Although the journey to and from Japanese lesson has not been very smooth due to the MRT disruptions, I still enjoyed my Japanese lessons. At least I had fun there.

Yesterday marks the third and the final time I would be attending ENGIN Bash as an undergraduate. I didn’t go for the one during my freshie years, but attended all the other bashes as a councillor. The first was at Attica (unsure of the spelling) at Clark Quay, then the second one was at St James Power Station at Harbour Front. Yesterday’s was at Supper Club near Raffles City.

Of all the 3 locations, I like St James the best because of the space and the seats. The second goes to Attica because it still had more space to manoeuvre, although the seats were like limited by the time we arrived. Then Supper Club. Supper Club, at least has seats when we arrived, so it was not that bad. But we couldn’t see the stage at our location, and it is quite crammed.

But I totally could not understand the theme “White Noise”, which just reminds me of image processing. At least last year’s “What the HAT” was because of people wearing hats to the event itself.

Due to the squeeze and the lack of vision, it was quite a boring night, just chatting and lazing around. And the first HUH (alright it was WTF) came when we tried to collect our free drinks when we arrived and they said drinks only start at 10pm! Ice water only. It was retarded cause when we reached St James last year, we got our drinks immediately so we didn’t have to crowd later.

Thankfully by 8 we’re allowed to get our drinks, else we’ll just bore to death. We actually left the event like 10.30pm? So if they served us at 10pm we would have to drink fast? Or leave without the drinks. (Maybe that’s their original plan? Haha)

Ended up at some Chocolate place at Robertson Quay. The waffle wasn’t fantastic in my opinion, but it filled a hungry stomach. By the time it finished, it was beyond 12 and the last train had left. So I discovered a new bus, 5N, that reaches somewhere near my house so I can walk home. That bus stop also supports another Night Rider bus, so there are 2 types of buses I can take in the future!

And it is now back to “more work!”. When is it time for “Job’s done”?

It has now been a few days of which people have been raising hell over an incident in the food blogging “industry”, so much so that it even appeared in The Straits Times, igniting debate of whether the blogging industry should be regulated. A rather stupid suggestion, because it is nearly impossible to regulate the internet properly.

I mean, who will follow the regulations and what will happen to those who fail to follow such regulations? We can’t police the internet. Even the Singapore government can only symbolically block porn sites but not ban them it its entirety.

Regulations aside, it amazes me to see the multitude of opinions, harsh and mild, lavished on this one incident. Sides have been taken and wars fought, but what for?

For those who are clueless, the general gist is this. A food blogger was invited to a food tasting session. He brings 3 guests. He was charged for the food and there was some unpleasantness over it.

No one knows for sure what happened other than the people who were present, so I don’t think it is right to jump into conclusions hastily. Xiaxue has a version of it, from “eyewitness”, and who knows what is the truth?

I would rather like to think this is a huge misunderstanding, as the blogger in question had pointed out. It’s a misunderstanding that occurs frequently because as humans we forgot to communicate effectively. Had the restaurant informed the blogger that it was “industry practice” (there’s such a practice and we need regulations to be drawn out?) to only waive the cost for the blogger + 1 of his friends, this would not have happen. Had the blogger asked and confirmed if all his friends would dine for free, this would not have happen. Misunderstanding happens all the time, forget and let live.

But I guess this interesting incident does help raise more awareness on social media, something that many people do not seem to understand as yet. I knew of this incident from a friend’s blog. She wrote about “Truth About Bloggers and Freebies“, a post which I feel does shed some light about blogging as a social media tool.

Even though I had not been popular enough to get invited to blog events, I have had read up many people’s blogs where they did attend such events. Blogs are not just diaries of people’s lives. Blogs have become a great tool to spread word of mouth, and it is something that every company should learn to harness. True enough, the bulk of the blogs are diaries, but they have so little readership it hardly matters. But when blogs become websites where people associate a certain degree of trust, it becomes a powerful tool.

I had once wrote in my EE3001 report about harnessing the power of blogs when I was the “Marketing Manager” of my project team. In it I highlighted how I would invite bloggers to come to my “event”, where I would host them for food and refreshments, and allow them to have hands on trials of our product. We would then allow them to write anything they wanted about our product – what they liked; what they didn’t like; what can we improve etc. Because they are allowed such freedom to write whatever they are feeling, it gives the element of credibility. And I, as a 23 year old undergraduate, can understand the power of using popular blogs. And I don’t see why others cannot.

If anyone wants to say there is no free lunch in this world, sadly yes there are literally free lunches in this world. I have been to one free dinner. Although it is not a lunch, but it was a free meal, with no strings attached. But anyway the point in question is not about a free meal. Indeed, as Xiaxue pointed out, bloggers can then proceed to give their unbiased opinion on their blogs, something that is worth money. Hence using free lunches to exchange for some publicity, I don’t think it is wrong. It is the same as asking a blogger to come and then paying him to write. But paying him to write eliminates any sense of credibility, so it would backfire.

Social media has been here for a few years, and it is here to stay. As we progress to become more connected to the internet through the use of data plans, twitters and other forms of information transfer, the internet has become a force to be reckoned with. Who knows, it might one day take over the traditional media.

Today marks the first Japanese language lesson I had this year. I had a whole one year gap since Yap Heng went for SEP and couldn’t continue. Due to plenty of weird reasons it got pushed pretty back till this August, and now I am taking it alone since Yap Heng is too busy to study for the placement test.

Hence I am studying the second of the four courses in the Intermediate series, and there will be 7 more lessons after this one. I find myself quite disengaged from the Japanese language, and the teacher is someone jovial and funny but he speaks Japanese pretty fast. Luckily I can make some sense of what he is trying to say.

Sensei calls himself forever 25, and loves branded goods like Burberry. He lives in a Toa Payoh HDB flat and he is upset that Pasta Mania and Starbucks are gone. He prefers his pasta and coffee to Kopitiam food, and he tells us that he isn’t speaking Hokkien when he talked to us about Kani Nabe, which means Crab Steamboat, or Crab Hotpot. He laughs at the oldest person in our class, a lady at 26 years old, for being one year older than him. And the youngest person in the class is a girl at 13!

Upon learning that I am from NUS he says my brain is good and I couldn’t say anything because I was so rusty with my Japan. I couldn’t even say I forgot when he asked me what I did when I was at Tokyo.

But the lesson reminded me that I loved the language and hence I must persevere even when I am taking it alone. The first lesson showed me that I needed more practise, and I guess I should devote some time to learning the language.

And it happens that my sensei has a Facebook account! And his brain is super good cause he remembers everyone’s names despite not having the nameplate thing in front of us. He is also a frequent traveller, travelling 42 prefectures out of 47 in Japan. And he travelled like what, six times this year already? Good life huh! I would like to travel that frequently for holidays.

I love my Japanese language.

I realized I haven’t been updating this space as frequently as I should; Neither have I been uploading quality posts comprising of my opinions on things that are happening in our world. I’m back in school after a 7 month break, since I went on my Industrial Attachment. Although I did take modules in school, it just feels different. It feels great to be back in school, although it is a little sad that it is now my final year and I will soon depart for work.

The focus of a final year student is also different. Other than studying hard, we have to do our final year projects, and also focus on finding a job before graduation

I went for the Credit Suisse talk yesterday, and I quite liked the way I hear that they have a business school of their own to train us, so that we need not worry that we lack business background. Plus it seems like they have been traditionally hiring people from Business or Engineering, because the lady paused and asked “Which faculty did I miss out?”, conveniently forgetting School of Computing and Faculty of Science. Should I be pleased?

The two men that spoke were analyst hires of 2009, and both of them belong to engineering, one from mechanical and one from electrical. Plus the event was held in LT7A, our engineering LT. Does this mean something?

In the following weeks, there are more talks going on, with one next Monday being MAS’s. However MAS disappointed me as they said it’s by invitation only, but everyone could apply via the NUS Career Website! Gave me a false sense of happiness at being selected. Lol.

I am looking forward to talks by many different companies like OCBC, DBS, M.Lynch, Barclays etc. It would be an interesting experience listening to all the different companies talk about themselves and how we should join them.

It’s week two, and school is more or less settled and every week is just time to repeat the same cycle over and over again.

My Japanese lessons are also resuming on every Saturday, 1pm-4pm at Delphi Orchard. That’s my 5th “module” I suppose. Must study hard and not waste my money!

Recently I’m starting to feel happier and I haven’t been emo for some time. I feel great and optimistic about life.