An update has been much desired no? I guess I got way too lazy...lol. Especially with the the project rush and the packing to London.
It's been more than a month already...going around....experiencing a place that's such a blend of urban and rural. Rural seems to carry negative connotations like being poverty-stricken, so I guess countryside would be a better word.
A bigger country with more land makes a big difference. As compared with Singapore, you can see there's so much more nature in small towns with their own parks. Parks with large open spaces fit perfectly into the picture of small towns and don't look like they're about to be eaten by the houses on the opposite side of the road. Lessons here are not much different in teaching styles, after all, how different can they be. It's the content that makes the difference I suppose. Lectures are half the time they are in NUS, as Prof Hugh Tan once said 'deceivingly simple.' which makes it scarier. At least for me, you never know how much is enough. It's not that the information given here is less, it's just that it is just enough.
Essay writing here is not an arts thing, those in the science department are expected to write as well. Which is expected given that if you're going to be a researcher, you need to be able to write coherently in order to convey your ideas and findings to the rest of the scientific community. Essays give you the room to find your area of interest and allow you to develop your ideas through writing out the findings that you've read up. This develops the evaluating component in a person, which NUS seems to be lacking in the students of the science faculty. Essays are seen as a nightmare (and I totally understand why...) as it's something entirely foreign and we've been conditioned to think that it's something that 'arts people do'. Too much spoon-feeding has led us down this road and somewhat crippling our ability to need to question what we are fed and to evaluate it resulting in us just take things as it is. Coming here, I somehow wish that I had spent my previous 3 years of tertiary education here. After my UROPs, I have realised all that I've been doing wrong in my writing and am afraid of falling into them once again as I have not written anything more since then to cement all those comments in.
Having the content is not much of use if your essay is so badly structured that people get lost half the time while reading it.