After a long wait of more than 2 years plus once again I step back into school for lecture, embarking onto the last phase of my academic life. A bit lost and nervous as looking at the email the prof sent us realised that nobody I knew was in the same class, no ex-classmates nor campmates, so it's a totally new start in networking.
My very first lesson in SMU was financial accounting, a subject which I had a slight head-start in as I sort of studied it myself when I was doing the accounts for Nomadic Tech. The prof today was Prof Wang who was from China and quite an interesting guy. At the very start of the lesson he was emphasizing on how different he is and how different SMU students are and he began by showing us some slides of funny pictures and encouraged us to find a boy/girl friend too.
Soon started lessons proper and what Prof Wang mentioned about SMU students are different turned out to be rather true. Firstly the way we had school is different; we had seminars instead of separate lectures and tutorials. This also means no ponning of lectures and sleeping during lectures. Next, instead of going word by word through textbooks and lecture slides, we spent of of the lesson time on a case study, leaving the textbooks and slides to read in our own time. Finally, SMU promotes discussion and unlike in secondary schools and junior college it's never quiet during Q&A session. Might be due to the fact that marks are awarded for participation but since most of the comments or questions raised were meaningful perhaps SMU students were just more out-spoken and such an environment spurs me on to be more extrovert as well. By the end of the lessons made a few new friends and they were year 2 students sitting in to prepare themselves for bidding. Saw Huifen from my secondary school class and spoke to her during the break and sadly she sort of forgotten me but that's expected as back then we were both quiet and shy students who rarely speak much.
Apart from training to be more outspoken, there's still much to prepare for academic life in SMU. Looking at the course outline for the course I had today, there's weekly quiz, several group oral presentations and final exam and with 4 modules it seems like uni life isn't that slack after all.
On a side note, I've managed to change the settings and appearance of my windows themes and now it looks like a Mac OS now. Look at the printscreen, cool right?
