Category Archives: Campus Life

5 best memories…

Posted on by

As the curtain falls on my time at NTU, I can’t help thinking about the past three years of my short yet eventful undergrad life at the Nanyang Business School that was filled with joy, laughter and challenges…

1) Case competitions

Designing a cool online marketing communication campaign for CP Foods? Trying to sell their frozen food products on a rainy afternoon? Yes, my team of three did them all and bagged the second prize to boot.

Winning the prize money, however, was not the best part, as such success and happiness is short-lived. It’s the memory of celebrating with fellow NTU participants, and the strong friendships we’ve forged, that will stick with me for life.

n1Three of the five finalist teams at the CP Marketing Challenge 2012 came from NTU. Hip, hip, hooray!

Continue reading →

Welcome, “villains”!

Posted on by

S1

In the REP (Renaissance Engineering Programme) family, we don’t consider bonding to be an important thing. We consider it to be everything.

As you might know from my previous posts, love, respect and a little bit of insanity run in the REP family, and the first step towards building all of these is the Freshmen Orientation Camp (FOC) – an event fondly organised by the awesome REP seniors to welcome juniors with a bang!

So here is an exclusive sneak peek into Ignire 2013. “Ignire” is the latin word for “ignite”, and surely, we saw some magnificent fireworks (metaphorically, of course) this year. The camp theme was “Super Villain” and as Shao Ying, President of the Organising Committee, put it, this was “a camp different from other camps as the freshmen trained to be true villains!”. So clearly this year, it was all about being “bad” and living dangerously.

Continue reading →

An ode to everyone…

Posted on by

As much as I love writing, I find it impossible to blog during exams. Nothing exciting ever happens then, just a monotonous chant of sleep-study-sleep-study-sleep-study and it never seems to end.

However, this semester was slightly different. When the worst was over, when I’d joyously handed in that final answer script in exchange for the life I once had, I realised something significant had happened.

Even though this semester was probably the toughest thing in the Renaissance Engineering Programme (REP) so far, it brought out the best in my classmates.

This examination season, the spirit of giving in the REP family was stronger than one might find during Christmas. So, I dedicate this blog post to the students of the REP family, the people who have consciously or unconsciously rescued me and our fellow classmates from the recent carnage.

Continue reading →

My own personalised exam welfare packs

Posted on by

Once again, it’s that time of the year.

After more than 15 years of being a student you’d think I would have gotten used to exams by now, but not really. Every semestral exam brings about thrills. (Last semester, I actually had a paper where the professor asked us to design our own question and then answer it!)

Anyway, the only good thing about exams is they provide excuses for lots of other unrelated stuff.

“Let’s have dinner together before the exams!”

“Let’s go for a buffet after exams!”

Pre-exam dinners, post-exam celebrations, mid-exam breather lunches – anything can be done in the name of exams, just to ease the stress a little. When it comes to stress relief, nothing else does it better than food.

Which is why I have this practice of giving out little personalised exam welfare packs to some of my friends just before the exam period.

What’s left of the exam pack I gave a friend

Continue reading →

The guide to happy mugging

Posted on by

It’s the dreaded mid-term season at university now, where life is rife with project and essay deadlines. Still, there’s no reason why one shouldn’t experience comforting moments now and then. It is during such trying times of a student’s life when one better appreciates the little joys of life – like the friends who stay back to study with you and yummy treats to get you going.

Tip #1:

Share your woes with a loved one.

Takeaway tuna salad from Raffles Place – credits to my loving study buddy.

Continue reading →

After the vows

Posted on by

I found my soulmate in the form of NTU’s Renaissance Engineering Programme, or REP. It is a holistic programme, one of the few of its kind that brings together the best of both worlds: science and humanities. Fresh out of junior college, I’d fallen hopelessly in love with a course that seemed challenging, exciting and intriguing at the same time. So, I decided to swear fidelity to my one true love and looked forward to an amazing undergraduate learning experience.

So how is married life with REP treating me? I get this a lot, for people in our world are always sceptical of relationships with strangers we don’t know much about. Joining REP was definitely a venture into the unknown, as I am a part of the pioneer batch of students now in our second year. So have I found the elusive marital bliss yet? Or have I succumbed to a premature seven-year itch?

As a true-blue pioneer, I can tell you REP gets frustrating sometimes. Most recently, that happened when I sat down with crayons and markers (for the first time in the past decade) to draw – yes, draw – for a prescribed elective at the School of Art, Design & Media. And it happened when I met my old friend, Electronics and Information Engineering, again, only it had grown more difficult and impossible (why, Fourier, why?). And it happens every second week when I have multiple assignments due, or continuous assessments that clash, or a car (for a build-and-test project) that adamantly refuses to run… and the list goes on.

Then why am I still here?

Continue reading →