//Life at NTU//

Finally my com is back!
Just the right time... when there are so many administrative and academic stuff to settle!
All those things are so confusing so I've decided to just keep whatever timetable they assigned me for this semester. Whether you can change your timetable, your subjects, or take extra electives really depends on how fast your fingers are, as everything is done online. However, since they opened the system to seniors first, freshmen are at a disadvantage. Which means to say we only have leftover vacancies to choose from.
A lot of things you gotta figure it yourself...erm since I didn't have a very analytical brain, I ended up in the wrong laboratory for my lab lesson.
Ok..so in the end I was late by 15 mins by the time I figured out that the laboratory I was supposed to go was at the other end of the school. (yes, weiqi, that's when you saw me looking flustered)
The campus map I had wasn't useful at all because I was bad at directions. Lol.
A strange thing about NTU is how they name their levels.
The highest level you can find in NTU is level 1. Before I got to know this, I was super shocked to know that my laboratory was at basement 6. And I also got to experience their lifts as two lifts on the same block may not get you to the same floor. For instance, I was already inside the lift when I realized the lift only travel between L1 and B3.
The first lab lesson I had was ok except for the fact that the class was so quiet.
Actually, when I first stepped into the lab, the whole place was dark with only 2 OHP lights shining. Then I realized that there was 2 lab groups in the lab. Everything had began without me as I was the last to enter. The lesson was alright except for the fact that the prof seems to be scared that I will accidentally cause a short circuit or even an explosion- do I look the type? Since the experiment was on diffraction grating, each time I tried to on a light source, the prof will go "eh eh….wait wait…what are you doing?"
Then after the experiment I watched a safety video which said that you have to consult the prof before switching on anything in the lab. Oh. How stringent.

For the second week we had the ECA carnival and IT fair. I couldn't believe it that they held the ECA carnival on the two narrow side walkways. Everyone was squashed together. Anyway, it was at the "throw your aeroplane" library booth that I won a thumbdrive! It is only 256mb but I was lucky, nonetheless. The atmosphere didn"t tempted me to join any ECA nor buy any laptop at all. All I saw was half-hearted attempts in introducing their ECA. The laptop fair only had a limited range of laptops priced above $2k which is not within my budget.

Although I'm still studying Maths, Physics…etc, one main difference from JCs is that there are more lectures than tutorials. For life science, I totally had no idea what is it about as the lecturer kept going on and on about Charles Darwin and revolution theories.
For a supposedly-familiar subject like maths, the tutorial questions were quite unexpected so it seems that the lecture notes were too brief and there's a lot to read up on. It doesn't help that I travel 2 hours to school and 2 hours back home everyday. Which brings me to another fact that the queue for bus 179 from boon lay mrt to ntu every morning is utterly horrendous.
So I was so happy last thursday when I finally arrive early to school, breaking my record of being late for more than a week.