Life As A Final Year, Final Semester Student

“What are you doing everyday in your room? If you don’t want to go to class, then go home!”

I couldn’t help but chuckle along when I overheard one of my housemates jokingly teased her roommate in a fake foreign accent. In my house, I think all of us are in our final year, and due to the extension of the semester, some courses only have one subject left to finish. Can you imagine, only 3 hours of lecture for the entire week?

And the subject isn’t even a technical one. It doesn’t even require attendance. Need I say more?

I’m not so fortunate, I have an additional compulsory technical subject to take (which makes 6 hours of lectures a week, not too bad at all), and my final year project involves a lot of research, experiments and testing, so I can’t bring the entire laboratory home. Some of my friends, however, need only to work on simulations on their own computers.  Which means, there isn’t a need to step outside of their comfortable rooms to head to labs. They declare their own holidays, and go home whenever they like because their work is portable.

This is my current workstation for the first quarter of the semester:

I now camp at the Post Graduate workstation during non-class hours to work on my research and writing one, if not (hopefully) two papers for my project. It’s almost like a routine, and I’m beginning to get acquainted with the other PG students (we’re beginning to trade biscuits and instant coffee now). The internet is faster here, there’s air-conditioning, it’s more convenient for me to have discussions with the fellow PG student I’m working with, and most importantly, it parts me from my comfortable bed.

For the next part of my work I will be camping at the nanotechnology laboratory, conducting experiments. It’s not as fancy as it sounds, I’m more concerned of the fact that the lab is quite a distance away and there will be a lot walking under the hot sun in the near future.

I do have spare time on my hands. When I’m not thinking about polymers and carbon nanotubes, I am also picking up some new technical (geeky) skills that I believe will come in handy in the near future. Sometimes, I write. And other times, I spend quality time with my friends catching up on the familiar thing called Life.

The peak of the journey has yet to arrive, but I’m taking everything a step at a time.

By God’s grace (and a lot of coffee), I think I’ll be fine.