super unproductive study day.

was damn annoyed cos things can never seem to fall in place. after so long. or maybe it is just me.

Silvia was sharing with me how she enjoyed classes in CBS cos it’s so different from learning in Italy. It’s more interactive and fun over here. Well, I can’t deny that students here talk more than those at home. But for me, it isn’t that much of a wow-er as compared to for Silvia.

Struck me like how people can be drawn to better opportunities out there, when they realise where they are now cannot give them what they want. It is most obvious in jobs, in migration, and here in education. Same applies for family and life I guess. If we don’t build a proper home, nice comfortable, healthy, happy shelter for our family, they will yearn be in others, they want to leave and they will, at the end of the day.

Finally learned out to tackle this super hard to read textbook – Strategic Human Resource Management, by Mike Millmore et. al. It’s a damn gg book. The sentence structures feels like double negative and they keep repeating conclusions from previous sections… Half the time, it is not constructing knowledge and understanding in me, just keep beating around the bush. I mean it is a good academic book. But man, it is totally not an easy textbook to read. Usually I spend like one entire day reading a chapter of about 30-40 pages.

Convinced myself to try reading from the summary to have a gist of what is important and what is not. Wala! I sped up so quickly! In half a day, I finished a chapter of about 25 pages and found a related article and read it all (: So happy with that. Thanks to the tips from Edward and the lecturer.

Really glad I picked up a skill to tackle a different kind of literature. Searching for articles have been interesting too. We are required to get an article a week related to the chapter of the week. Of course I don’t do it diligently but I do it like half the time. It has been an experience searching for scholastic journal articles on the Emerald Management Xtra. I won’t have done it if I were in NBS. Haha, we are fed with most of the resources.. Don’t have to spend personal effort to look for more. Guess it would help with my future projects and FYP (:

This was a delightful find (: Most people hate our uniform but I am proud of it still. Cos I think it’s the most recognisable uniform, looks straight and smart. Kudos to Li Lao Shi and all those active alumni actually. Hmm, honestly I’m not that enthu about alumni stuff, cos just have this impression that I will meet a lot of very senior seniors there. Haha. I’m fine with just meeting up with my batch and catching up. But doesn’t seem the same to have like our Alumni Gala dinners and stuff. For example, I prefer Hwa Chong MAF cos we are still free to have our informal gatherings. Like the class will meet up for a dinner or something before that.. Stay at our class bench, mingle with the juniors.. Dance all the mass dances that we never mastered.. Have supper and hang out… Despite my preferences, I still respect like those RV seniors who try to keep the spirit alive amongst the alumni. It was a total right choice to go to RV, cos it shaped me into who I am today and the friends that I made there had a great impact on my life…

And to quote Shannon, it was my “last lonely dinner” (: Friends are back (More like, Jessica the cook is back)

On Friday, I sat through one of the most torturous presentations. It was super not impressive. It was those lousy PW group levels, not even freshman level, but JC level. Business concepts were so shallowly applied, I wonder if I was in one of the best business schools in Europe.

If I had not experienced doing countless group projects since my time in RV, and even some in primary school, I doubt I can handle critical analyses and even group dynamics well. Not denying that they are bullshit, but they were still the necessary evil to make us gain an edge in this aspect.

However today, it was the most entertaining statistics lesson that I’ve attended. The tutor carried is extremely odd accent – strong American accent at the beginning of the sentence and ending off with a strong Danish accent. I was so confused, his nationality was like a complete mystery, haha. Turns out that he is from California but is a Danish now. The style in which he conducted his lesson was super amusing and light-hearted. Once again, it was like a talkshow or entertainment variety show. What I learnt from the lesson was not about stats. (The concepts were really basic. it’s only like 5% of AB103) I got to see how comfortable a person can get speaking to a class of 80-90 people, and how witty he can still be, while passing mandatory information to the audience.