Hmmmm… been a real long time since I blogged so here’s a long awaited update.
I was busy with the FYP prelim 1 presentation and report (which was not too bad i guess) except that I was extremely nervous and a lot of jolts between slides… hmm next time must rehearse out loud and not slack. Sheesh…. next time gonna be worse with the examiner around! Nvm lar.. think about it when the time comes.
Dad was talking to me one of the days after a bad day of lab about how to get opinions from people about where you want to go in career and how to get there. I think all I needed at that time was the push to talk to people and find out more. And I went into frenzy mode emailing a lot of people who were nice to talk to me and express opinions.
Esp among these were Prof. Teoh who forwarded me to Kelvin – he was extremely friendly and gracious to explain what he does and the challenges and how the field can be useful to society. I think that was what I needed to spur me on to ask more people and get as many different opinions as I can to make a more informed decision about my career. Although it is kind of early, there’s no harm looking around for places that I can go and how I can be useful. Next, A/P Toh was very useful to intro me to the speaker of a talk on heart valves Mr. Goh, who entertained me and recommmended how I can go about getting experience and how to progress in a career in regulatory issues. Also, A/P Toh forwaded me to Mr. Kwek in HSA who corrosponded with me and I think I will talk to him sometime next week. Finally but not least, Dr. Hill from Centre for Bioethics gave me a totally different perspective on seeing things not from a law and regulatory but an ethical veiwpoint and how engineers and healthcare professionals face dilemma in the workplace. I would like to thank them personally on my blog for entertaining me and giving me a sense of direction.
But most of all, thanks dad for being so supportive. Time to brush up my resume and start aggressively looking for jobs.
But first, FYP beckons… and it’s not helpful getting chased out of my own lab! =s
Hmmm.. some things that I need to do this time of the month are: GEK Essay, HR Essay and TE presentation. Oh man! I’m gonna drown myself in projects!
On a different note, I went for Real Run and it was an awesome experience. I think I did pretty weel judging from my standards and I look forward to Peal Izumi next weekend…. time to up the distance from 21km to 30km…The marathon is coming. =)
After toiling for many months in the lab, I finally thought I had results that were worth all that was going on in the background, weeks of failure, the arguments, the going home late, the daily low morale, the stress-relieving runs, the skipping lunches, the meeting people later and later, the weekends burnt, the not having time for myself when I wanted to and what not… The list can go on forever and ever.
As it turns out, there are still loads to be done before I can get something concrete out of my project when I thought I was in high spirits for my presentation today. Besides being a sick and a stress wreck in the morning and panicking all through the presentation as fate would have it, I need to redo almost all my experiments again that I’ve done in the past holidays to get a better batch of results.
Sheesh…I know myself to have the tenacity and patience to do what is needed properly but I don’t know if I have the tenacity to hang on to it with people moving on with other things like VIP and what not. I want to travel, trek and do stuff that I’ve always wanted to do but like someone told me, it’s not the time to play now. I never regret having sleepless nights trying to understand and memorize the protocols and the procedures because they became second nature to me but to re-live the times – alone. This is another thing altogether. I’m already more alone (in a certain sense) and this is going to make it worse. Or is it that I’m seeing a bleak future. Or is it that I just fear the feeling of nostalgia.
Maybe it’s a bit of everything. I want to get out the cycle of shitty feeling. Maybe when you share something in your life so important to you, you relate things that are totally unrelated. That screws you up when things don’t work out. I will never forget how I felt doing my report. I procrastinated to do the report till the point I had to rush through it over 36 sleepless hours to blast through the whole thing. I don’t really know whether I did justice to the time I spent on it but everyone says it’s good. How good? I don’t know. Now it doesn’t matter. Or does it?
On one hand I fear the feeling and on the other, I do not want to let the project go because I’ve spent so much of myself over it emotionally, psychologically, time-wise and even physically.People say research life is a lonely one. I can see why… because you sacrifice everything for it. I want to rant…. again.
