Friday, June 13, 2008
A recent update: I've recently received an email from the Graduate Studies department telling me I've been accepted into the Masters by research programme with Research Scholarship included. I wasn't expecting their reply so soon as they said they would reply by Oct 31, but good news is welcome anytime. So it's back to school come Jan 2009. ^^
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Ok, this is going to be the final installment of all the 'nostalgia trips'. I'm going to talk about a special group of people whom I have stuck it through with together these four years - the Lit cohort of 2004/2005.
The Lit cohort is of course made up of very different individuals with diverse personalities, and there are of course some particular individuals whom I can't say I like very much (such as arrogant Lit students who like putting down others in the meanest possible way during class) but on the whole, most of my Lit classmates are really cool and wacky people, and great fun to hang out with. And I love the way all of them are passionate about reading, even though it doesn't always show when we're exhausted after sleepless nights of mugging and can't wait to use Middlemarch as a doorstopper and read our comics and fashion magazines again.
As is my usual (peculiar) habit, I hung out more with the seniors than with people from my own batch from my first to third year, so it was in my fourth year that I got to know the people who were always around me but whom, sad to say, I didn't often notice... =___=;
The module that really made me realize that the Hons cohort was a bunch of great people is definitely the Topics in the 20th Century seminar taught by Dr JN. This was without doubt one of the most enjoyable modules I have taken throughout my four years in NUS. Every week, 20 of us would sit in a circle in the rather obscure ADM block, and during the class discussion segment of the lesson, groups of 3 or 4 students would take charge of the seminar and faciliate discussion of specific short stories by several women modernist writers, while Dr N sat behind us and jumped in only now and then.
This way of managing the class worked amazingly well, as it gave us the freedom to take the discussion in many different directions and to give our opinions without fear of saying something stupid and getting whammed by the lecturer. If you've taken Lit modules in NUS before, you'll know that seminars tend to be rather quiet affairs dominated by a few outspoken people, but this wasn't the case for the 20th c class. There was a really wonderful sense of camaraderie amongst all of us, a kind of understanding that we were all on equal footing and in the same boat, and that we should engage with each other and help each other out. And our discussions (especially of Katherine Mansfield's stories) were seldom dry, solemn 'academic' speechifying events but lively, heated, passionate exhanges of views and opinons drawn from our own real life experiences. And then we would laugh at ourselves for getting so worked up about whether "Phoebe is a slut" or "strawberries are symbols of horniness" or if we took William's side or Mary's. I took away so much after every discussion, and the seminar certainly hit home the message that while reading is a solitary activity, we need to interact with other readers to discover new angles and perspectives we would never have thought of on our own.
In the second semester of my fouth year, I began going to the EN Hons Room, sometimes to study and sometimes to chill out, and it was there that I found yet another home I could belong to. The Hons Room is populated by a bunch of crazy crazy people whom you can whine about how slowly your HT/ISM is moving along, bitch about unsympathetic teachers and "Muthu", laugh till you cry about the "Chinese man hair syndrome" and listen to Stefan's not-so-secret salacious affairs. Sometimes I really pitied our neighbour next door 'cos we were always making a ruckus...
It was in the Hons Room that I got to know some people whom I had thought were rather cold and distant towards me, and they turned out to be real fun to chat with. I like my Anime Club friends and other friends of course, but one also needs people who can have a sense of sharp ironic humour and share one's skepticism and anti-establishment disrespect for all the sacred cows of orthodoxy.
It's a real pity that I only got to know these people in the last sem of school, and we'll soon be leaving on our separate paths to different careers and different social networks. The Hons Room is probably deserted now, but the bookshelves, the lockers and of course, the fridge, will always keep those traces of us and of the times we spent together, even as the room passes into the hands of the next generation of Lit Hons students.
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I'll be leaving for London early tomorrow morning and will return only on the 27th. Till then!
kaoru said at 6:13 PM
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