Day 61: You mean P2 starts next week?

Done with P1 exams! Woo hoo!

Glad that I won't be hunched over an exam paper for 3 hours at a stretch for at least another 7 weeks. O_O

As soon as our last paper (UDJ - Stats) was over, my class began to flood the bar on campus, pretty much drinking the beer tap dry. I was particularly pleased that the conversations hardly ever concentrated on the recent exams but rather on the various exciting holiday plans that people had over the short 4 day break before next week. Always good that people are looking forward rather than looking back. ;)

In increasing order of distance, these are some of the various locations I've heard that my classmates are holidaying at:

• Singapore (of course some people are staying in town, like me!)
• Penang (family)
• Sailing around Phuket
• Diving off some remote Thai islands (near Phuket)
• Bali
• Hanoi
• Borocay (by far the most popular with about 1/4 of the class going)
• Manila (family)
• Maldives
• Shanghai
• Beijing
• Tokyo
• Los Angeles! (meeting girlfriend from Peru "halfway")

Personally, I would have been keen to join one of their trips if it wasn't my birthday today. I haven't had the luxury of celebrating my birthday in SGP over the past decade and figured perhaps it might be nice to get family and friends together for an evening. For one night only, my place will turn into a "pop-up" prata stall complete with authentic prata guy flipping pratas on the spot. =)

Here's to a great start in P1 and hopefully more exciting times ahead for the rest of the year!

Day 57: 2 down, 2 more to go

Day 1 of the exams for P1 and first up were FMV and OB1. Can't say I was particularly worried about either of them since I pretty much get the hang of FMV (and I'm generally comfortable with math) while OB1 was a group exam so there's not much that you can really prepare for it except getting a good night's sleep and taking a chill pill to prevent things from getting heated in the discussion.

Nothing much to report about on FMV. It was a tough paper and tricky in parts but I'll be fine. As for OB1 though, that was a new experience for me. I'd never taken a group exam before where we have to answer a set of questions as a group within a fixed amount of time. We all get the same grade. It's definitely an interesting dynamic trying to get the discussion to move along especially with time pressure. I'm glad we took some time last week to discuss our "plan of attack" and to give rough allocations of time to various activities. I believe we came up with a more comprehensive answer, but at the same time the overall process took a lot longer than if each of us were taking the exam individually. I do feel that the lessons learnt from OB1 are probably the most relevant regardless of the job that we find ourselves in in future. Whether it's about building effective teams or influencing people, appreciating differences in personality or displaying transformational leadership, we're definitely going to encounter these concepts again and again.

Now for Accounting tomorrow... O_O

Let's just say that the library was packed when I left this evening.

Day 55: Exams around the corner

Believe it or not, exams are just 2 days away! Gotta say that the number of people "camping" in the library over the past week has increased exponentially. Sometimes there aren't even any free desks at the library. Guess that "last minute panic" is a great motivator.

A strange phenomenon when it comes to studying: I end up being motivated to do ANYTHING else but study (like update this blog for example). If you think that P1 is crazy intense, you ain't seen anything yet. We will have 1 less week (7 in total including exams) in P2 compared to P1 and we will have 2 more classes (7 in total). It's going to be INSANE. O_O

The other main thing that has been dominating the water cooler chat on campus is the outcome of the campus exchange bidding. We're all given 200 points to bid for your place either in SGP or FBL for P3-5. Your home campus (the place where you started) is your default campus should you choose not to bid or if you don't successfully make the cut off. It all depends on demand and supply for places and in general people want to be in SGP during P3 (when it's winter in FBL) and in FBL when it's P5 (when it's summer there). Due to the introduction of 50 extra points for people who are keen to commit to 3 periods in a row to the other campus than the one you started at, the number of points needed for SGP in P3 (175) and FBL in P5 (149) shot through the roof this year. Needless to say, many people were really frustrated/disappointed this past week when their desired campus exchanges didn't work out because they hadn't bid enough. Personally, I was hoping to get the option of going to FBL in P5 but severely underestimated the number of points needed. Oh well. Hopefully this will be a useful data point for future generations.

Alrighty. Enough procrastination. I've really gotta try to figure out Accounting.

As we learnt in Organisational Behaviour: Take deep breaths through your nose and regulate your breathing and think happy thoughts (okay, maybe we didn't learn about the "happy thoughts" part). 4 more days till the end of period party. =)