Perception

This is the first of three summer vacations that I’ll enjoy during my tenure as a university undergraduate, and it’s not often in our education system that one has a three-month period of no-school. As mentioned, I’ll detail the goals that I have for this break in this post.

On hindsight, the break last December had mixed results for me – on one hand I managed to learn PHP and MySQL, but on the other, I had a rather disastrous internship in the last two weeks. Arguably, I did learn a lesson from all that, so one might say it was actually a blessing in disguise. This time, however, the duration is significantly longer, so expectations will be higher as well.

Securing an internship
As usual, my top priority is employment, but instead of any random (albeit well-paying) part-time job, I think it’s important to intern in a position relevant to my major or course. Three months is quite a fair bit of time to gain industry experience, and it’ll surely be worth the trade-off of slightly less impressive remuneration. I’ve set my sights on an internship with the Singapore Police Force’s Technology Department, of which the interview is tomorrow, and it’ll truly be a fantastic start to the vacation if I manage to secure this internship.

Work on projects
My weeknights and weekends will hopefully be free enough for me to spend time working on my other projects, namely my brothers’ project (which I will announce as soon as they decide to go public) and also OrangeOasis, which I’ve only worked on partially so far. These are important too as I’ll be able to continuously hone my design and development skills while having long-term projects that I can commit to.

Volunteer, or do something altruistic
I’m probably just conscience-stricken, but this break seems to be a good time to go karma-hoarding. Although I’ve never been a fan of the Community Involvement Programme (CIP) because it was an enforced activity, I guess it’s never too late to pick up a good habit. I haven’t really thought about how I would achieve this, but one of the ways I’ve considered is to join the school’s Community Service Club (CSC), although I’ll have to see how well that goes.

Exercise like, for real
I don’t think an explanation is really necessary for this one.

Others
There are a few other things I would love to accomplish, given that I have sufficient free time during this vacation (read: unemployment). One of them is to learn Python on the Django framework, something I’ve been meaning to do so for quite a while. I doubt I’ll have enough time, however, so it’s quite unlikely. The other goal is also similarly in accordance with my resolutions, which is to read more fiction and development books. I’ve just started on John Grisham’s The Broker, and I still have The Art & Science of CSS and How To Be A Rockstar WordPress Designer enqueued.

So these are my aims for the next three months. I hope that by the end of July, I’ll be able to check three or four items of this checklist, and declare this a fulfilling vacation.