A Chapter in my Life
I always get hit by this incredible wave of nostalgia whenever I set foot in NUS. The winding slopes, the sprawling stretches of ugly concrete, the expressionless undergraduates trudging around with books and files in hand. Lately I've been back twice, just short visits, and it's like a brief journey back in time.
What was I thinking about then, I wonder...as I climbed the stairs to the central library...walked down (and up) the slope leading to LT32...looked up references in the medical library...passed through BizAd on Fridays...stared out my little two-pane window in EA...
NUS is a beautiful place at night, without the throngs of students and vehicles on the road. Sunday nights spent there gave me quite an experience of solitude. In the sheer silence of the emptiness, one's thoughts can be as clear as written words. I was all alone in my little enclave, and it was a strange bittersweet kind of feeling. For the first time I really understood what it was like to miss being with family.
Any regrets? Well I could have worked harder during my first two years, and I really should have stayed on campus earlier (my CAP was directly proportional to the amount of time I spent staying on campus). But those are just little stains on an otherwise brightly coloured quilt of experiences. CSS, cell-group meetings in whatever vacant room we found, long drawn Exco meetings in Holy Cross, Friday masses, varied adhoc comm meetings, random fellowship at the CSS corner, late-night jogging on the tortuous slopes of Arts and Biz, the post-jogging snacking, Fong Seng, Clementi hawker centres and Holland V, pubbing at WalaWala, clubbing at Zouk and dragging wasted friends back to school, praying the rosary together after cooking dinner at PGP, arrowing people to say grace during dinners, running into friends along the corridors...
Not forgetting my memorable final year - spent mostly as a deranged lab rat poking pipettes into microcentrifuge tubes in a remote corner on the fourth level of MD4. My crazy indulgences in clubbing and drinking, and later that mindless RPG MapleStory. The night I spent in the lab just before I submitted my thesis (and there was this other night where we decided to celebrate mooncake festival in style). The close ties I built with my fellow lab rats, trying to make the most of our mundane lab lives. I never had any lack of dinner companions in those days.
I guess I should have written this earlier. It's kinda like a delayed post-mortem. A tribute to my four years in NUS. And to the lifelong friends I've made there. In a way, I guess Uni life does rock.
What was I thinking about then, I wonder...as I climbed the stairs to the central library...walked down (and up) the slope leading to LT32...looked up references in the medical library...passed through BizAd on Fridays...stared out my little two-pane window in EA...
NUS is a beautiful place at night, without the throngs of students and vehicles on the road. Sunday nights spent there gave me quite an experience of solitude. In the sheer silence of the emptiness, one's thoughts can be as clear as written words. I was all alone in my little enclave, and it was a strange bittersweet kind of feeling. For the first time I really understood what it was like to miss being with family.
Any regrets? Well I could have worked harder during my first two years, and I really should have stayed on campus earlier (my CAP was directly proportional to the amount of time I spent staying on campus). But those are just little stains on an otherwise brightly coloured quilt of experiences. CSS, cell-group meetings in whatever vacant room we found, long drawn Exco meetings in Holy Cross, Friday masses, varied adhoc comm meetings, random fellowship at the CSS corner, late-night jogging on the tortuous slopes of Arts and Biz, the post-jogging snacking, Fong Seng, Clementi hawker centres and Holland V, pubbing at WalaWala, clubbing at Zouk and dragging wasted friends back to school, praying the rosary together after cooking dinner at PGP, arrowing people to say grace during dinners, running into friends along the corridors...
Not forgetting my memorable final year - spent mostly as a deranged lab rat poking pipettes into microcentrifuge tubes in a remote corner on the fourth level of MD4. My crazy indulgences in clubbing and drinking, and later that mindless RPG MapleStory. The night I spent in the lab just before I submitted my thesis (and there was this other night where we decided to celebrate mooncake festival in style). The close ties I built with my fellow lab rats, trying to make the most of our mundane lab lives. I never had any lack of dinner companions in those days.
I guess I should have written this earlier. It's kinda like a delayed post-mortem. A tribute to my four years in NUS. And to the lifelong friends I've made there. In a way, I guess Uni life does rock.
posted by gleekzuh @ 8:49 PM
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