It’s been almost 4 months since my last post, and believe me, this was not by choice. This past semester has been an intense and very trying one. It’s actually not over yet, but things are finally easing up and so I figured why not do a quick sanity check.
I really did not expect the semester to be this busy. I had even made sure not to take up any side-jobs, and I remember thinking this semester should be pretty chill since all I had to do was focus on school. And focus on school I did! So much that for the past months my life revolved excessively around my school work. Writing wasn’t the only hobby that got put on hold. I could barely make time to climb, read or even just hang out with friends.
Of course, this semester was not all bad. There were a few unexpected surprises and achievements along the way. Firstly, I took a module titled Creativity, Culture and Media and it was the most abstract thing ever, but also really interesting and eye-opening in many ways. I went into this module alone, not knowing anyone, and the random partner I was assigned decided to drop the module in week 3. That turned out to be pretty great because I got reassigned to a new group where I made two new wonderful friends!
I also managed to build two different projects as part of another module. The first was Who’s Who?, a guess who icebreaker game inspired by Empires. It was my first time building a real-time game on the web so I definitely learnt a lot from it and I’m glad it turned out pretty well. Next up was NUSAbroad, a companion app for NUS students applying for exchange. This went beyond the scope of just a school project, for my team and I treated it like an actual product which we hoped to see succeed. We built, tested and launched it to the public like how we would launch an actual product. It gained a fair bit of traction, and in fact, we’re now in the midst of discussing future plans with the school!
All things considered, it has been a very fulfilling semester. But if you were to ask if I would do it again, my answer would be no. Not because I regret doing the modules I did, but that I would probably have spaced them out instead of doing them all in the same semester. I’m not afraid of hard work, but I do very much value a work-life balance, and that is something I’ve been made painfully aware of in the past months.
lowercased C 