A reflection on my experience in NUS

25th Jun 2021

My commencement ceremony will be happening this 1st July 2021.

Looking back, I have mixed feelings about my time in university. There were certainly positive experiences, I made potentially life-long friends, I enjoyed some of the modules, and I learned a fair bit from my internship experiences.

However, the occasional insomnia, the recent anxiety, and the constant stress did put a dampener on my positive experiences. I feel a confluence of emotions, and it doesn't make my experience in university one that is bittersweet.

One of my biggest (initial) struggle in university was coping with the fact that there are no right answers, and examinations aren't as "standardized" as it was in secondary school or junior college (JC). This is especially true in computer science, where there are multiple ways to go about solving an algorithmic problem (albeit some are more efficient than others). Examinations can also be ridiculously difficult.

This "style" of education in my course at least, was very different from what I was used to in the education system leading up to university. In those places, questions and answers are standardized. As long as you do enough practice papers, you will do sufficiently well during the examinations. Essentially, rote learning was emphasized and rewarded. Students were boxed up and labeled based on their abilities in certain subjects, quantified through our exam scores. School didn't feel like a place to be curious, it felt like a factory churning out students with "desired" abilities. Whenever I asked a question that wasn't tested in the exams, the common answer I got was, "It's out of the syllabus".

While it is true that I could have searched for the answers on my own, or clarified with the teacher outside of the classroom setting, it wasn't something that was intuitive to me. Yes, I could have cultivated my curiosity and passion to learn, but the environment to do so was sterile. Eventually, whenever I received an "out-of-syllabus" reply to my questions, I immediately proceeded to ask other questions I had that were "within the syllabus", as if agreeing that it would be a waste of time to dwell on something that isn't going to be tested.

I spent the first 2 years of my time in university trying to 'unlearn' most of what I was used to, to view learning as less of a chore. There were many times I was content with knowing enough for the examinations. This was not sustainable, as the content can be quite heavy and abstract. I needed to learn how to enjoy what I was learning, to be curious, but the mental model I was used to was impairing me. Once I overcame this initial hurdle, the later 2 years of my university were more enjoyable.

I don't blame the education system for my mental and emotional struggles in university. I do think the system is slowly transitioning away from traditional rote learning. Education doesn't stop after university. I'll continue looking forward to what I can potentially learn, rather than be bitter about what could have been.