Perception

My past ten days or so has been pretty much immersed in academic pursuits, or studying, plainly put. It feels strangely unfamiliar studying again, but I guess this is the result of the 3-year difference since my ‘A’ levels. EC1301 Principles of Economics was difficult to study for considering the number of concepts covered. Embarassingly, despite my economics background, it wasn’t easy picking up the concepts again.

And that was just Monday, the first day of the second half of this semester. The subsequent three days were spent preparing for my project presentation, which was rather time-consuming. Not a fan of public speaking, I wrote a script and spent an agonising amount of time rehearsing it. Unfortunately, or perhaps fortunately, I wasn’t selected to present in the end.

I made an interesting revelation during the project presentations though. As a designer of a product, one may have a complete understanding of the product, but expressing or explaining this understanding is a lot more difficult than one might think. Being an audience to the other groups’ presentations, I sometimes found it hard to follow the concept of their product. Not to be critical, but in fact concerned that my own group’s presentation could have been similarly experienced. Won’t then all our efforts have gone to waste!

So that was Thursday, leaving one day for me to cram and practise for my CS1101Y Programming Methodology mid-term test on Saturday. It didn’t matter that it was an open-book test, and my worry was the tediousness of tracing the test questions by hand and memory. Furthermore, it’s a programming module, so how does one survive a written exam? Without the reassurance of DrJava, I certainly felt lost during certain points of the test, and also vulnerable to the trick questions that awaited me.

But excuse all the drama, as I made it through the paper, although hardly confident at all. It was a good first experience, and hopefully an accurate indication of how the final paper would be. It has also led me to wonder whether programs like DrJava has made me too dependent on them when coding, such that if I were to write a program on paper by hand alone, I may not have the confidence to do it correctly. Hopefully, such confidence comes with endless practise, not to mention experience, and soon.

Update: I got my mid-term results back, but didn’t do too well for them. I only managed to score slightly above average for both, which is disappointing, so I’ll have to work a lot harder for my finals.