Submission.

Tomorrow (or more like today) is the deadline for the submission of the HYP report. It’s a day that, to be brutally honest, I have been waiting for the past couple of months. Once this deadline is over, that signals the end of the most major part of the project – the part in which 80% of my HYP grade would be decided upon.

I won’t dare to say that my report is well-written because I was never a great writer to start with. Not precise enough, not concise enough, not argumentative enough… all these were just some of the “comments” that I’ve been hearing for the past couple of weeks while writing the report. Because my writing skills isn’t exactly fantastic, I don’t think I would be very well-rewarded for that aspect of the report.

Then for the research itself, I know my experiment sucked. The results were not spectacular, and to a certain extent I was lucky enough to get one result that I was able to report on. On hindsight, I should have perhaps planned much more on the experiment, and started much earlier. At least if I had crap results turning up I could have salvaged the situation by running it again. By doing it so late I just made life difficult for myself. I know I can point fingers at everyone possible, but ultimately I know I still have to bear the most responsibilities for that.

But if someone were to accuse me of not making enough efforts on the report, then it is a claim that I am not prepared to accept. For the past couple of months I’ve been slogging on the report, sacrificing quite a fair bit of things that I normally enjoy doing. I’ve read papers after papers, and tried again and again in churning out a good report. Anyone can say anything they want about my project, but lack of effort should not be one of them.

Then the supervisor. Let’s just put it mildly and say my supervisor-student relationship was a dysfunctional one. I never enjoyed my time with him, and I’m sure the feeling is mutual. If ever I run into him again, I’m going to treat him as a stranger. He made me want to completely wipe the memories of the project out from my mind.

That said, I must say that I also learned a lot of things throughout the course of the project. All the academic papers that I read opened my eyes to a lot of concepts (though most of the time I think they weren’t really interesting), and I certainly learned a lot more about researches. Until this date I maintain that research could actually be a fun thing to do, but it’s always individual’s process through the research that determines whether it is an experience to cherish or better forgotten. For me, this HYP research experiment would definitely be the latter case.

Whatever happens, I think I’m done with my report. I’m submitting it tomorrow, and I’m not really concerned about what grade I would eventually get as long as I pass. Anything higher than a B would mean that my second upper is safe, though a B- would probably be enough for me to sneak through. But whatever it is, I’ll leave it to the divine powers to determine my fate. Sometimes it’s important to learn how to resign yourself to fate.