Haze.

The haze today was pretty bad again.

This is the University Hall when there is no haze.

This is the University Hall when there is haze and the PSI is at 130.

I’m sure everyone can see a difference.

Anyway I went to school for my French lecture and tutorial – all 4 hours of it. As usual the lecture was a torture because of some punk in class. I was so irritated that I really wanted to shout at him. If you want to flaunt your French, move your ass off somewhere. Stop trying to impress the class cos nobody is even remotely impressed. If I were to say we are sick and tired of all that rubbish that you manage to churn out every Monday and Wednesday, I would have been saying the greatest understatement in history. I don’t like to beg people, but I really beg that you can just shut the f*** up and do us all a favour.

After my French classes I went over to the NUSSU Secretariat office to see some friends. It’s good to see them looking fine and doing OK.

Had a chat with Jeremiah at the NUSSU secretariat office, and subsequently with Cheryl at Munchie’s and it seemed inevitable that we would talked about student activities stuffs. Of course both Jeremiah and Cheryl are involved at the Union level while I’m more at the Club level, but at the end of the conversations (especially the one with Cheryl), I understand why people seem to enjoy doing all these stuffs at the Union level – it appeared to me as if that they do not really take “people appreciating my efforts” as something that they want to get out of at the end of the day. I may be wrong, but it did leave me to ponder about my faculty club.

I see people complaining about the club, complaining about the faculty, complaining about the atmosphere, etc etc. Sure, when you look at SOC it really may not be the most exciting place to be at. The workload, the studies, etc, are indeed something that are really heavy for us. But isn’t it the same case for everyone else in the university? I’m not going to believe that people from other faculties are not having a hard time with their workload and things like that. Just because someone is from Arts or BizAd that means their workload is not heavy? I’m having none of that.

So what’s the problem of us here at Computing? I dare not say I have a solid conclusion, but I would think it basically comes down to the following:

1. Ignorance – there are people who are really not aware of the existence of the club, let alone the things that the club does. You can’t blame them when all the club does sometimes to engage the student population is through emails which I understand a lot of people send it straight to trash.

2. Free-riding – It’s so typical of mankind, isn’t it? We all are born free-riders. We just want to take and never want to give. If the club managed to fight for the student lounge for us, we just take. But we can’t be bothered with the state of the lounge. When the lounge is dirty, we write big notes on the notice board and complain, but we can’t be bothered to take the initiative to help clean up the place. When the club managed to fight for opening of tutorial rooms for study periods, we just go and use. We can’t be bothered to help maintain the rooms nicely. We can’t be bothered with the rules. Why? Cos we are all free riders by nature. We only ask what we can take, but we never ask ourselves what we can give.

3. Can’t be bothered – You may say you have tried giving. But people are still not coming forward. My explanation is you can’t be bothered to approach the right people. Do you think the crowd we had at Rag Day this year happened by chance? If not for the effort of those seniors who asked and begged the freshmen to turn up on Rag Day, would we have such a big contingent? They could be bothered to try so hard to get people to come, so if you tell me you have tried and people are not coming forward, my response would be simply “you didn’t try harder”.

4. Always wanting to be appreciated – Yes, we are human beings. We like to be appreciated for the work we do. We always like people to praise us or give us a pat on the back and say we’ve done a good job. But hey, if being appreciated is the force to drive you through, I would say that you are sadly misguided. If we know that we are talking about a crowd that belonged to the first three categories above, we should know better that we won’t be appreciated for the things we do. If you do student activities, you should keep in mind that you cannot ask for people to appreciate your efforts. You should be doing things because you want to do it, and you feel that whatever you want to do would really make a difference to the lives of everyone.

5. It’s never my fault – When things don’t happen, it’s never my fault. It’s always somebody else’s fault that something screwed up. We are university students, we should learn to accept faults. We should be brave enough to admit things cock up because we did something wrong. A brave man is not someone who points fingers, but dare to admit mistakes when they commit them. Generally people are more willing to forgive people who admit their faults than those who point fingers around.

6. It’s useless in the past so I won’t do it again – Oh even I’m guilty of this. I kinda stayed away from club in my year 2 because of the bad experience I had in year 1 (it was more induced by one person – those who know me well would know the entire story). But nonetheless I came back. I came back because I thought there is something that me as a SOC student, can do for the rest of the student population. I just hate it when I hear people complaining that it was bad in the past so they don’t want to do it again. If it was bad in the past, why don’t you press on and do it better the next time round? Problems for the first time are lessons to be learned, and any smart and mature university student should find ways to tackle those problems, not run away from them and turn their backs against the faculty. Since when has NUS (or any other educational institutions for that matter) taught us to run away from problems when we encounter them?

7. No Action Talk Only – A lot of us are great NATO people. We talk big and promise a lot. We always say what we want to do, what we want to achieve, but it’s always just talk. We say “we planned a lot of things to be done for this this this and that that that” but in the end it’s all just plans. No solid action taken. But when something right does happen, we can’t wait to claim credit for it. I’m guilty of this too. But at least I try to really do something. And do take note, when all you do is NATO, people with eyes can see. If you have been just talking and talking and did nothing, people will know. People will know whether you are doing something, or just plain talking cock. For example, Tengjie did a great job this year for the float – and he definitely wasn’t one who just talked. And everyone knew that he has done a great job – he didn’t need to tell anyone that and all of us could see that.

OK this has been a long moaning post, and I’m sure a lot of people out there won’t agree with me. But as a year 5 student, I do believe that I’ve been around long enough to see all these things happening again and again and again. When people nowadays tell me all the reasons why they want to stay away, I just tell myself “oh no not the same reason again – give me something new”…

But something Cheryl said just now made a lot of sense – we Singaporeans just like to be associated with winning things. So I guess maybe when SOC start winning a lot of things that are to be won then we can start having the support of the people…

Hey but didn’t we win the Most Improved Collection Award for the Rag & Flag this year?