My first year in NJ

And today, I stepped out of NJ for the last time (officially as a student).

2 years have gone by pretty fast (I wouldn't say 'very', thinking of the many times the days seemed to go by so slowly). No one told me it was going to be this tough.

Summing up the life of a J1 (okay, my life).

Orientation came and left. Then it was the official start of J1 (or in our case, SH1). I still recall the first few days with my class. I had problems remembering Alvin's name and sec sch. I found it weird to call Bong (Jianwei), 'Bong'. I remember how Evelyn declared she hated her name being pronounced as "Averlyn". Wen Qi was like our class's tour guide during the first week. Pranj and I made friends with Melvin during the first Econs lesson (which happened to be our first lesson of the year if I don't rmb wrongly). And of cos, I was glad to have Pranj with me in the new class. Jos and I met during touch rug trails beforehand so naturally we became friends (and we were the only 2 girls in class with chinese lessons).

The lecture-tutorial system was an eye-opener but we all adapted pretty quickly. We also got used to the discipline system in nj (ie, know who to avoid when walking around in sch). Our class had recess tgt at the end of the canteen every break. Everyone groaned when the morning announcement "All SH1s, please proceed to LT5 for your first PW lecture..." was read. Then we were assigned our pw groupings. Happy or not, live with it - that was something most of us felt hard to accept. But we still did, albeit all that arguing, gossiping, whining, complaining along the way.

PW became the convenient reason for every J1's stressful life (not that it wasn't). Working with people of different backgrounds, wavelengths, perceptions, ideas and way of doing things truly tested our limits. The endless flow of quizzes, class tests, consol tests, exams didn't help (not to mention the demands of CCA/ research attachment etc). For my class, we had a wonderful timetable that released us at 4.30pm FOUR times a week, excluding cca and extra consol lectures. It was a mad rush every single day; even weekends were hectic (crazy rush to meet pw groupmates, catching up with homework, revising for tests, doing cca stuff). We hardly had enough time to take a breather. An occasional public holiday/ half-day was like treasure, or so we thought. We were constantly reminded, "please spend this holidays to revise..." and were thus piled with even more assignments than ever.

But for all the lousy, depressing, stressful moments we went through, it was all these things that made us closer. We shared the same countdown with one another - phys quiz down, chem test down, PI down, 15 minutes before lecture ends, weekends coming etc. For the first time, I appreciated the phrase TGIF. We had many common topics (again, pw, tests, homework). We celebrated when GPP SIX was finally approved. We moaned at our tests results. Then one day, we started laughing at our tests results because we failed so ridiculously many times - it was almost a norm.

Reading my classmates' blogs, I realise we all had one goal - study hard and pass promos (or at least be promoted). And with that came along many depressing rants. Everyone felt everyone else was studying (mugging) harder than they were. Everyone made promises to themselves to put in more effort on their blogs, like a note-to-self kind of thing (haha i should do that too). Basically, we were all insecure in one way or another. And yes, that feeling was shitty (forgive my language). Results came and we were all promoted. Huge relieve ('Huge" is an understatement).

Somehow or another, we survived (or may I say, scraped by) J1. Any uni student/ working adult reading this would probably scoff and think "oh wait till you come to uni/ into the working world"). But that's just how it is. We pass one phase in life, look back and smile at what we have achieved. Then we move on only to realise how little we actually achieved previously.

But J1 has been a significant part of my life, despite taking only 1 year of the many. And I'm glad we survived it as individuals, as a class, as a cohort.