loneliness

Whenever I go into introspection, I feel alone.

I've always been trying to find ways in which I can rationalise personality. I found MBTI, I found some hope. But now I lost hope in it again. It's just so fallacious.

Everyone is unique, everyone is alone. You can have social interactions with other people, but it's hard to go in-depth. Even married couples remain mysterious to each other, there's always some part in a person that is never explored.

I saw this quote in Google headquarter once: All human beings have three lives: public, private, and secret.  You can access a person's public life, if you are an acquaintance. You may access his private life, if you are his close friend/spouse/family member. But you can never access the secret life. That will be a locked room in which the key only lies in the heart of the person himself.

Sometimes, even the person himself has lost the key.

Maybe I'm asking for too much. Maybe interaction with others at a superficial level is enough. But isn't that a bit sad? A bit...I don't know, lonely.

But who am I to delve into other's personalities, when I don't even understand myself? Are we meant to understand ourselves in the first place? Every decision I make seem to base on a ground that I don't quite understand. Why would I do that? Why would I want that? What is the thing, that influences my choices, my mood and my thoughts? Is it pure randomness? Is it a higher being? If there's actually a thing that affects us, are we still free, conscious individuals?

I really don't know. Thinking of all these make my brain hurt. And I'm still feeling very lonely. And more confused.

Chemistry Olympiad selection test

I planned to post this before the test but I was too busy studying for it. Now that the test is over, I will just combine the experience before the test and during that of the test itself.

To be honest I was quite desperate before the test. Somehow I feel that it's a must to get into chemistry olympiad, for the following reasons:

1. It can motivate me to learn more things. It's always good to have teacher and peers who are good in chemistry to teach you and guide you in your way to learning chem.

2. It feels impossible to get good results for the Singapore Chemistry Olympiad if you are not in the training team.

3. Most of the seniors I know who are good in chemistry are in the training team. Somehow I feel that if you are not in the training team, you are not good enough. How am I suppose to further my studies and base my career on it if I'm not good enough?

But after the test, I feel that there's still a long way for me to go.

Maybe the test is hard, maybe it isn't because I wasn't really thinking. But I realise that my foundation is still somewhat weak. There're definitely some marks lost due to not understanding the terms in the question, which is quite stupid. And I was crapping half of the time. I guess sometimes I just don't know what the question is talking about. And there are some questions I didn't finish as well due to lack of time.

Also, I didn't study smart. I was reading up on all the extra stuff in McMurry, without knowing that only A level stuff is tested (or is it) according to Dewei. In the end I didn't really study much for arene mechanism. But it was fun, gaining new knowledge as you continue to read.

Actually, after today, apart from having a mild depression from the test, I also realise that it's not that important to get into the training team. This test shows me the standard and I feel I'm not really there yet. If I happen to get in, will the accelerated learning really benefit me? After days of hardcore mugging during the holidays, I realise that knowledge, which I once thought was so inaccessible, could just be gained easily as long as you put in the effort to read it. This is like a new method of studying discovered. Back in high school, the mentality was that school test is important, which may be true since I won't get into this class if I didn't perform well enough for my school tests. I did try to read up on things but then they were compromised by homework and mugging for tests. Moreover, the good books are all in the red-spot section making borrowing them really inconvenient. Whereas in hc now, all the books are available for longer duration of borrowing. I can just borrow it whenever I want, and take my time at home to read them.

So maybe I should level up my standard by reading stuff. Although I still prefer a mentor to guide me along my learning journey, I can try to build up my foundation by extensive reading. It's just that...I still seem so far away from that standard. When can I ever catch up with the rest?

Regarding empathy

I have never regarded service highly, you know, like going around distributing food to the less unfortunate, paint their homes or donating money, this sort of "act of kindness on purpose". In fact, I have always felt that the fact we need to do these things indicates that the government is not doing its job well, for if the welfare coverage is thorough those "less unfortunate" can live independently of help. I used to hold the view that people doing this kind of things are doing it for selfish reasons--so that they feel better about themselves. But recently, I realise that maybe people do help others out of pure goodwill, because they are able to feel the pain of those in need. And that may be the reason I've been holding on to this view for so long--lack of empathy.

It's not like I have no feelings for others at all. I'm not a sociopath. But my empathy is mostly based on common experience i.e. when I feel the pain of a person it's likely because I have experienced similar things before and the memory is being summoned. My parents are not very well off, but at least I grow up in an environment with good physical conditions, love and toys. I have never experienced that kind of poor living conditions with a constantly empty stomach before (although I'm often starving because I don't eat breakfast and have to eat leftover food every afternoon in primary school...long story). Therefore, it's really difficult to empathise with those people, who are stucked in less fortunate kind of life.

Not only this, sometimes it's hard for me to even empathise with my peers. I cannot understand people crying over results, people sad because they have a quarrel with their friends etc etc. Maybe it's because I have never attached a great significance to these things. Even if they happen to me, I will not be as affected as my friends who also experience them.

Back to the service part, to make myself feel the people, I try to imagine being one of them, which is the best I can do. Imagine if I am an urban poor, living in a crammed apartment with electricity and water occasionally cut off. I have no decent food to eat except for porridge, in which I'll still be starving after the meal. Will I want someone to give me food? Of course. But still, this does not resolve the root of the issue.

I feel that there's something very wrong with our society. We have all the NGOs who are actively helping out the "less fortunate" and students doing CIP and all that. But these actions should be completely voluntary and out of kindness. It is not their obligation. Moreover, there's some things that they can't do. You can help to organise and clean the house, but can you change it to a bigger house for a family of five living in a one room flat? You can't. It's the government's responsibility, but now the government is pushing the responsibility to the NGOs, expecting them to be the ones taking care of everything...

Sorry I'm writing very incoherently. Basically the reason I started this post is because I realise there are people who really feel the pain of the people suffering and who will feel very happy for people they have managed to help. This make me feel somewhat bad about myself, because I simply fail to do that. Maybe I'm over-critical, but I tend to look at issues from a (relative) objective angle and find out the real reason to a problem in order to solve it completely. Yes, it's true that service can help people, but not in a very significant way in my opinion. The problem still persists.

And shall I do something to make me empathise more? It's very difficult, unless I'm really being put into that condition, which I refuse. Maybe people are born different, so some are meant to deal better with people and emotions while others better with systems and inventions. Either way, you can make a positive change to the world. The world will always have a place for you.

Sleeping late again

As you can see from the time I post this, I didn't sleep tonight at all.

I really need to do something with my life.

The thing is, I don't even know how and why I end up sleeping so late. It's not that I'm very productive anyway...started out to complete my physics kinematics ws and did three questions in five hours. What was I doing for the past 5 hours???

Ok I admit, I was distracted by my comp. To be honest I was stalking people, my classmates and my CT. The results are rather interesting but I'll not post here. And there's facebook and all. Every time I stay up late, it's for a different cause. Until today, I still cannot find the root cause of all this screwed sleep pattern.

Maybe it's my lack of awareness of time, together with the "don't care" attitude. I really have no regard of time when I'm engaged in activities that I'm interested in. It felt like 5 mins until I check the clock and realised that 1 hour passed. One hour passed, just like that. How wasted.

This issue is important. I'm going to reduce my lifespan by a lot if this continues. I need to do something about it. But how? If I have to constantly check the time I'll be unable to concentrate in what I'm doing, and that will just make more time wasted. I think it's still the problem of self control. Maybe I should just try to stop myself in indulging in activities that are not important. This defies the natural human cognitive response to attention grabbing things but oh well...

What is life?

Why the effort

Recently I begin to wonder why do we have to put in effort for things, why do people have the drive to achieve excellence, and that will can be so strong sometimes, but no one knows where it comes from? Is it merely a survival instinct? I think there's more to that. Even if you don't do so well, you can still have a decent life. Why do some people want to over exert themselves so much?

I can never see the value in repeated practice to perform a simple task well. If the task is complex it may still be worth it because it's more like you master a skill. However doing the same simple thing over and over again bores the hell out of me. That may be the reason why I hate sport, especially running, so much.

They say that if you want to be expert at something, you must practise it for at least 100 hours (or something like that). For me, the degree of tolerance really depends on the nature of the subject of practice. I still cannot understand individuals who practice the same thing over and over again for the sake of being proficient in it. That may be a good drive at the start, but I feel that such passion won't last long. This is just like people who practise the same type of questions over and over again for the exams, such that when similar questions come out they can just close their eyes and do them. I feel that they are doing it for the wrong reasons. Sure, you can achieve better mark in the exam, but what does that mark mean? What is it that they see in that number, that makes them work so hard unnecessarily? To me, if you have no genuine interest and appreciation in what you are putting effort for but you put in effort merely to achieve that desired standard, then I would say the effort is put in vain.

To do well for something, I feel that the most important thing is still appreciation. Appreciation in what you do. There is nobody in the top of their profession who doesn't appreciate what they are doing. They must see the value of their actions, then they will feel that the effort they put in is for a good cause. You must see the big picture first, or life will just be a repeating race of task completion that has no meaning assigned, and hence no satisfaction can be gained from the effort you put in.

So maybe I'll amend my view. Maybe it's good to push yourself forward sometimes, as long as it's for the right reasons. However it will be unreasonable to exert yourself too much. There are more things to life than just to pursue your interests. Pursuing your dream is a wonderful thing, it gives you the big kind of happiness in your life. But small happiness in life also matters. Listening to a nice piece of music, drinking your favourite beverage, enjoying a nice picnic in a breezy afternoon, ice cream, chocolate...sorry I'm getting distracted. Anyway, these sensual fulfillment can also be a small form of satisfaction.

There's still a kind of happiness you can get, and that will be from interpersonal relationships. Friendship, kinship, love relationships, and so on. Sometimes you may, strangely, derive the greatest satisfaction of life from these. However, this has been a problematic area for me, since I'm not good with people, and I find that people relations are too complex to handle and they may become troublesome if handled inappropriately. As such, I tend to value solitude over company. I know I may be missing things, but it's alright, I still have a long time in life to learn and approach people. Quality is over quantity, so I would rather have a few very close people, than a large group of acquaintance whom I do not know well.

Anyway how do I even go from putting in effort to people relations. My main point for this post is actually how we can balance hard work with enjoyment of life. We know that our time is finite, so we can't possibly dedicate all our time to our career/interest and leave no time for enjoyment of life, unless all your joy in life is entirely derived from your interest which is a bit sad. It's okay to relax once a while, but you must have a general direction of your life in mind so you will not want to slack too much because you know there are many exciting things waiting to be done.

Ranting on my high school education

Okay this is not exactly ranting. It pin-points a few things which I feel are very wrong with my high school education or just Singapore education in general. Sorry for the lack of decent posts these days. JC has began and I no longer have the leisure to write about random interesting stuff.

Apparently I was quite bored as always so I went to look through the HCI yearbook for 2013. And I was amazed that they actually listed out every single achievement the school has achieved throughout the year. Looking through their achievement especially in the sciences, I started thinking about the reason for their spectacular results for certain science competitions. Then I started thinking what's the difference between their school and ny that made the results differ so drastically.

Are boys really superior to girls in maths and science? I don't think so. For SJPhO, it's apparent that NY and HCI are on par, if not NY achieving better results. However I noticed for chemistry and biomedical olympiad, the difference is huge. It so happens that I took part in both and seeing their outstanding performance made me a little sad. But what's the reason behind?

I remember that for biomedical olympiad, the amount of help that our school offered could be almost reduced to zero. Okay, so definitely we have to read the textbook, fair enough, and there is a list of reference texts that we have no idea where to find them. Also there are a few links to neuroscience websites. Okay now you have to read up on your own. Kthxbye. Then there's no more news until the day of the competition.

Nobody took the olympiad seriously. In fact, the entire 401 was forced to go for the olympiad. No one was motivated to study for this olympiad and the results, not surprisingly, were quite bad. Only very few of us got into the second round and maybe one or two highly motivated individuals got bronze? The school didn't announce it anyway.

In comparison, those in hci were given thick stacks of notes to refer to. Not saying that we shouldn't try to find more information on our own, but the information on the internet are so disorganized and varying in standards that some notes will definitely be helpful. And also, it's apparent that hci took this competition seriously. Therefore, I think that the students were also more motivated and thus achieved remarkable results in the end.

For SJChO it's a bit of a different story. The reason that HCI always outperform NY in SJChO is mainly due to the difference in difficulty of the school's chemistry syllabus. I still remember the first lesson of our chemistry olympiad training. We were deeply traumatized. Before the day we were still using the convention of bohr's planetary atomic model and suddenly BAM lvl 1up you need to visualise everything in 3D quantum mechanics now and we don't care if you have read the relevant chapters of your chem O textbook we are going to test you on it the first thing on the first lesson! Well the guys have no problems. At first we thought they were so into chem they actually read up and know everything by themselves. No. They actually learnt these stuff in their school syllabus, in Sec 3, before the chem O lessons started.

So we appeared very dumb there for the following chem O lessons, and for a long time felt inferior until we realise that this difference in ability is due to the syllabus.

Not sure if hc chem syllabus is a bit crazy, they actually covered way more things than that required in O level. Especially on physical chemistry. NY, in contrast, really covered only the O level things. This put us into great disadvantage, or rather, put HC into great advantage. Being properly taught and covered in school lessons is definitely better than simply skimming through everything in weekly 2 hour lessons that are not even properly delivered.

Something definitely needs to be done to NY's chem syllabus. Chem is becoming the easiest science to score among the three sciences. There are almost no challenges for chem papers, just the possibility of carelessness. Unless you have difficulty understanding the concepts, chemistry is never difficult. In comparison, NY's physics syllabus, which in my opinion is not that easy, helps to pull up the overall standard of physics students in NY, which may also explain our not so bad results for physics o.

Syllabus aside, there's another thing which I feel HC and NY are very different in, which is the passion and interest in what they are doing. From my observation, girls tend to follow rules. A lot of them don't really know what they want, so they set their grades as a measurable goal, something to spend their time working on. However, they do not feel much for the things they are putting work in. They are putting in their effort purely to be good. Be the good girls they always are.

Boys, on the contrary, can be very passionate in what they are doing. It's this great passion that motivates them and make them push themselves further and further. This is rarely observed in girls. Most girls just want to achieve their standard of "good", and that will be good enough. This may be able to explain why guys tend to outperform girls in competitions, things that require one to go for extra miles. Sure, some girls mug for competitions. But they really just mug for the sake of competition, not their own interest. In the end, they may achieve good results, but their interest may not even lie there. Of course, this theory does not fit for all guys and girls. There will be some girls who are motivated by passion and some guys motivated by result. However, because of the general trend, the school cultures of hc and ny are very different.

For example, the entry requirement for certain special programmes are much higher in NY than in HC. This does not make a lot of sense to me, because since you are only specialising in a field of interest, why must you be good at everything? However that's the case in NY. (It may be due to the belief that most girls when they mug, they mug for everything instead of just one. So only the overall result reflect true ability of the student.) It seems that in NY, you must be first good at something before you can develop your passion for it. I'm not sure what the culture of HC is like, but I know that the requirement is definitely lower, there are more people in the program and many of them who are extremely passionate individuals get to participate in various related activities.

Comparing our high school lives, I feel that mine is a bit wasted. What did I spend my time on? Well I admit in Sec 1 I was totally goofing around. In sec 2 my passion started to develop for the sciences partly because I was good at them and partly because I found the other lessons (especially humanities) unbearable. In sec 3 and 4 was when I started to get really interested in the subject through exposure to higher order stuff.

The exposure that the school gave was definitely not enough. I tried to borrow relevant books and read them. However, reading these books was at the bottom of my to do list. With so much workload and other mugging to do, I have to eventually return them without absorbing much of the content. (just like now I have a university physics textbook right beside me and I'm still blogging this sigh I should read it thoroughly someday). You see, that "someday" is always the excuse for not reading these stuff. I admit I'm a bit of a procrastinator, but I also wished that back then I'm not so caught up in school work, especially in projects and assignments that I know won't assist me much in my learning.

Maybe it's really that my passion is not strong enough. Maybe if it's a hc guy he will prioritize those readings over the mundane school work. I don't know. It could be my own problem, but I was trying. The mindset of many ny girls is to get decent grades for exams, and I was probably one of them. But I'm already in that group that starts late. Some of the hardcore muggers start preparation one months before block tests and two months before end of year. In the end? Good results still not guaranteed (one hard paper that relies heavily on thinking rather than memorisation kills all). I really don't see the point in setting the examination as your only goal since the examination system is very flawed. Marks don't reflect competence. Some of my PRC friends still get many marks deducted because they didn't write precisely enough. Even for physics you have to remember certain model answers to get the full mark. There's just no point.

If I were to relive my high school, I will probably take up a research project in sec 3, be fully committed to it, focus less on grades, and learn more by understanding than memorisation. I don't believe that I'm born innately inferior in my ability to learn and understand. Okay, I'm not born a genius, but I trust that I'm smart. All I need is more commitment and practice, and mostly importantly, the strong drive to understand and gain new knowledge. Now I'm in a good class full of good people. I can learn from them, instead of constantly comparing myself to them and feel inferior. Self-improvement is still the most important thing in life.

Sorry if my post sounds incoherent. It's meant to be a rant post so yeah...but the issues discussed are real and significant. I'm now very happy with all the subjects being the ones I like. I really hope my passion can be strong enough to motivate me to achieve greater heights. Also, practice, although not very interesting, is important to achieve competence. I'm not striving for proficiency but a clear understanding must be reached and I must be able to apply the concepts well. I shall keep that in mind.

P.s. not sure if you can see but I'm trying to improve my english. My english in this post is really bad with repeated vocab and sentence structures...sigh. Also it's a bit sad thinking that probably no one will read this post in the first place.