'being' at USP

Inisghts come when you least expect it.

This one came when I was having diarrhoea in the afternoon. And the thought just came up, about why USP people *might* be different from other students. I just came up with a few traits at the top of my head.

USP people might tend to be more academically confident about their majors, as in, they take the fact that they are good at certain subjects (or their major) as a given, and they work darn hard to keep it that way.

Maybe this confidence develops into something else, that having at least have a safety net, they are more... curious about other stuff, say, about the basis of their subjects. For a chemist like me, I might be interested behind the basis of quantum mechanics or the ethical consequences of chemical weapons and research (I'm interested in both. But now i realise that the mathematics of QM might be beyond me. Chemical weapons... well... I would have nothing to do with them, but chemical weapons in WW2 were based on pesticides. sigh... The guy who invented the AK 47 wished he could have invented some agricultural invention instead. oh wells).

See... I digressed. Maybe I'm just *different* in that sense. For me, moving out of context is as natural as water flowing.

So I was processing my diarrhoea (to put it rather euphemistically) when I began to wonder what I would do if I didn't do USP... I suspect that I would still be contented being a chemist-in-training, just a little more angsty, maybe a bit more experimental with my GEM and GEKs. I guess I would have done like, PH1101, SC1101, GE1101 just for *fun*. *Maybe*, I would have done the critical thinking module, but heck, maybe I wouldn't. All the "maybe"s.

If I wasn't at USP, i wouldn't have had the boldness to recognise that I might have a genuine knack for writing, and I might've gone through writing in a roundabout way. I remember some America general in ww2 telling his troops that the fastest way home was to hit Berlin asap. The fastest way home was the longest way through. Or something like that. Maybe my current situation in writing is something like that. I have to go further now, in order to go lesser later. If I was fully in science, it would have been the other way round, I would have accomplished my task of getting a BSc, but I would have one heck of a trip to get to writing. Who knows?

I want to write about the future. The future of technology, of society, of the environment, all combined. Science as it is now, science as it will be in the future, and the application of that sciecne in the future, in context to everything else. Political, social and economic systems change only as a result of the change in techie.

This would be an A'level-style quesiton: does tech influence PES, or is it the other way round. A more deeper level of inquiry would be... Is scientific dominated by the demands of society, or should science be pursued for its own sake? Delving into this, then, we might ask, should science be pursued for its own sake? All these are all, cliche questions that erm... really don't answer anything... Maybe we need to start small, about the context of a science-based education in Singapore and how it affects the education curriculum. Maybe science in Singapore is really non-science actually. How students perceive these things as dogma, in oppposition to the constant criticality of the scientific approach. Who knows, perhaps Molecular-Orbital theory is waiting to be dethroned by another theory, and then by another theory, and so on. Nothing is ever the the truth, but it is different from no truth ! To put it cliches, science is the search for truth, and its very basis lies in there. If there was no truth, then there would be no point in doing science. oh wells

But... normal people don't ask these questions, or maybe they do, but don't have the time to stop and think. I guess thats where people like me come in... and thats why I'm in USP, i think, for people who go off on slightly different tangents, whose mind cannot be constrained by society or by education...

Maybe maybe... where would i be in USP again? I'll probably be furiously mugging in the hope of qualifying for second upper class honours somewhere. wth. but here i am blogging. argh.