2014//2015

“Ten! Nine! Eight… Three! Two! One! Happy New Year!” This chant is still fresh in my mind, as it happened only few days ago. Failing to open the lid of apple cidar for a few times, I yelled this chant stridently and farcically with my high school classmates every attempt, as if the time kept reversing for us, until we succeeded eventually.

Let’s temporarily magnify this reverse to 365 days, and see the chronicle of my 2014.

January-February “Graduated” from driving school! It’s quite proud to say that I passed the test in one try, but not so to say that my driving skill now is “not up to standard yet”. Despite amassing a not-too-bad mileage over the months, people who watched on my driving would comment “oh this falls short of my expectation”, and I’ve no reason to dissent.

My mum recently said “I always have my husband as my driver; now I have my son,” was she true for this moment? Or she wanted to make it as motivator?

March I finally safeguarded my bursary for my Pre-U on 20/3/14, when the SPM results were released! In retrospect I could have done better for an A+ for Chinese through more practice in reading and writing, but I might have also lost an A+ in some other subjects, particularly Biology. For more info kindly visit my post on “Ministry-Student Game”.

May-July Starting with my qualification into IMO 2014 team, I submerged myself for few weeks in the realm of IMO training, and in turn, enjoyed the final moments of being with trainers and teammate. The overall performance was astounding from micro to macro aspect: I finally won my gold medal and the team, once again, broke records on ranking, total scores and medal tallies. There’s another write up on this, and I personally regard it as my masterpiece in blogging (as for 2014).

August Passed my Licentiate Diploma from London College of Music in Piano Performance with 92 marks! Besides choosing the right songs that empowered me the ability to bestow their characteristics completely, I felt that I gained musical maturity in the year, particularly in playing pieces requiring more emotional details and nuance in dynamic changes. While this means a stop for me in pursuing my performance qualification, should I be considering music as part of my career?

July-Dec Studying away from home has finally become so real for me after 17 years coddled by my parents. If you ask students on this most would say either “severe homesick” or “complete freedom”, showing overtly that parents would no longer oversee our activities tightly. College life is, thus, a chance for us to demonstrate independence, especially in household and study matters. In platitude language, “no one is going to see whether you spend too much time on phones”.

Now let me change the perspective from hindsight to foresight: how am I going to make 2015 differ positively from 2014?

1. Stellar aim of year: Do well in all tests. Though I realize that scores aren’t indicator of success in our life in the long run, they are passport to success (for shorter term), particularly in university admissions. Doing well in all major and minor tests (A-Levels, SAT, mock exam, class tests, etc) in this ordeal of studying under stress for my A-Level is painstaking, but isn’t it a common aspiration for all of us?

2. As said above-university admissions. This means I’ll need to put in a lot of effort in all application process. I once attended a talk on this and when the speaker mentioned on “20 hours per school” for USA, I knew he didn’t embroider the truth.

3. Improve my writing–that’s my primary purpose in blogging! After reading through a book on writing, I realized that I’m entrapped in language of cliche, and it’s not easy to overcome this because I’ll need to come up with my own way of writing the same phrase. Some may find my usage of bombastic diction rather overwhelming (especially for some posts), but this seems to be the best way for me to learn new words–to stop this I would need to be able to use those words naturally.

4. Burnish my speaking, including everyday conversations. Sometimes I had the problem, that what I say comes before what I think, causing me to have difficulties in finding a word, or expression, to express my ideas. I hate it. Other times, I tend to stave debates off and be too submissive in giving out opinions (although I do have one), and I’ll have to redress it.

5. Make good social relationship with others, in different facet of friendship circles. Despite the astounding workload of A-Levels, it should not hinder us from spending time in this (not in plethora, of course).

6. Improve my physical skills. Can I beat 5km in 30 minutes? (My record is 4.77km, by the way).

All these are correlated with time management, in which I believe that if I find myself spending little time on every activities (like socializing and blogging), yet hardly find time for studies, I know most time is gone into junk–“facebooking” (or being engrossed in other social networks). Even though I made just a peccadillo in this (as for second half of year compared to first), there’s still room of improvement for me. Enough with time wasted, let’s be productive.