What happened last semester?

An uber long post

Now that the exams are over, I always like to take a little time to reflect and think back on the events this semester, and begin to really examine the lessons and implications.

A lot of things have gone right and wrong for me this semester. I messed up some relationships, built better bonds with others, and endured more stress than I ever did. Compared to Y1, I have a clearer picture of what my future looks like, as some of the uncertainties from previous become resolved, as old dreams appeared to haunt the present.

This semester some old dreams returned. For a long time now, I had been searching for my place in the world, and perhaps it is only this semester that I had begin to find my way. Without going into the specifics, the friends that I met this semester have given me many steps towards the fulfillment of that wish/desire/ambition, but this was not without some pain in the process. Along the way, I entered into an internship, which was a source of much stress. I was doing 6 modules, 2 of which were exposures. My choice of modules inadvertently helped rescue this semester on academic terms - the tragedy should not be too severe. Yet this internship was important, on hindsight, in providing a measure of experience and exposure towards my dream.

Yet there were other unanticipated costs other than academic ones. The workload of 6 modules and the internship, plus additional commitments were, overwhelming. My drive to want to concentrate on work pulled me away from friends.

And then there was my own personal commitment to USP, where idealism drove wedges into existing relationships. I regret a lot of things now, but many of these things are past regrets already. Can’t dwell on them, must move on. I had certain ideals about student community and what it could mean, and the episode of being involved in student politics certainly provided many lessons.

I learnt that student community is extremely dynamic and diverse at the same time. My own perception of USP has, for the longest time, been fixated upon the ideal that it is a place where world-changing/impacting people start to do change/impact stuff. Apparently, reality is not like that. These ideals did not appear from nowhere though. I remember visiting USP during JC days, and getting acquainted with people then. Maybe then, I was biased right from the start without knowing it, and it was in this semester that those biases really unraveled. The lessons learnt seem so obvious - that people are different, and we are vastly different from one another in what we want in life and in USP. People will see USP differently, and take from USP different things. I’ve taken USP as a process of learning how to find my place in the world, people will see it as their own stepping stones for various ambitions/desires/wishes.

I thought I had arrived at certain commonalities of the USP experience, marked by opportunities for action and intellectual exploration. I had thought that the maintenance of a community of passionate people would be the third leg that completes and balances USP as a student-driven institution. However, people put different weightage on these 3 things. Opportunities are many times taken for granted without consequence; intellectual exploration is sacrificed for focus on grades. Student community developments gets retarded for the same reason of grades - people think their own social milieu is sufficient for their current lives.

Unfortunately for myself, I rarely thought of ‘sufficiency’, or ‘enough’. Social sustenance for the present is definitely necessary, but so much more could be achieved. Yet it is the so much more that becomes a contested space - and this is where I got hurt and in turn, hurt others, between competing visions and objective of what USP means.

By now I’m not going to say who’s right and wrong. Differing visions of USP have their own merits and pitfalls. One vision that I imagined, emphasized intellectual exploration and rigour, along with the need for action, and sees the community as an instrument towards the achievement of these objectives. Other visions rightly claim the importance of community for its own sake in nurturing for social and emotional development. These three things are not really mutually exclusive, except when it comes to resource allocation and in the reality that exists on the ground. Perhaps students (at least in NUS/USP) will always place their academic achievements ahead of their extra-curricular achievements.

And then the hurting began. Coupled together with the internship, friendships took second place. Bonds frayed. Lost track of the social universe. The concepts that I described began to sound doctrinaire and out of touch with what people were experiencing. I thought of concepts like the “Academic Career” to describe what was going on in USP, about how people developed and found/created their own spaces within USP as they acquired more experience and contacts… I thought about mentorship, and what people wanted or needed, except that I never exactly found the time to ask or mingle around with friends to know what was exactly going on. Distanced from the necessary social contacts, things went downhill on that front.

Looking back, I wondered if it was hubris that made me acted in the way I did. Now I know better - that everyone has to take their own time, and find their own way in the social and intellectual universe of USP. And this is not forgetting the multiple identities that we will always carry with us in life, as children of our parents, of members in specific communities, and of ourselves as the individuals that we are. USP is only that chunk in our whole lives and perhaps, not even the most important one. I’m learning to let go, of letting things be as they should except if something terrible were to happen (can’t imagine what). The Y1s will in turn become senior to another group of Y1s who will also ask the pretty much the same things I put out here - about finding that social ‘place’ in USP, about their own intellectual explorations, about wrestling in life the different but important priorities that threaten to pull apart the fabric of our lives. Friends/peers from my batch will continue to seek new grounds for explorations in either exchanges and overseas endeavours, or in the fertile intellectual field of their respective majors. Y3s move into the season of wrapping up this undergraduate career. These words are cheap. The experiences that accompany these words will be severe at times. Our own subjective experiences; our psychological states, cannot cross the gap between persons. No, we are not like the Na’vi who can link their minds together - not so, for us. Now, I’m not even sure what ‘seniors’ can offer to ‘juniors’. We can only describe our own paths, which are not the paths that the juniors will walk. We describe what we see, hear, tell of the things we know ourselves, but the experience itself is something subjective and unbridgeable. The juniors will have to walk on their own road, and overcome what they will face by themselves. No amount of advice/talk from seniors can help them do what they will have to do. In all these, everyone will be alone, individually. No one can walk for us; we can’t walk for another no matter how much we desire so.

So, even as we are tied together for now in this few years, I’ve learnt, that ultimately, we will go pretty much our own ways. The social bonds that tie us together for now will come under strain from our respective desires and ambitions - which may or may not be reconciled. Tensions. But for now, the future can wait. The present is what it is - a gift. And inasmuch as I’ve neglected so much of the present, so I hope to salvage.

Still, dreams remain. I made other contacts that opened up a future that before, had only been dreamt of with little hope of fulfillment. I have had the fortune to come so near my dream; I want to, simply, allow more people in USP to have the same chance as I’ve had.

Enough of the politics, of the pulls that tear me away from the people and the things that matter.