My congratulations to all my colleagues. Five years was no light affair. All the best to our future endeavours.

Hooray, as of today, October 31, 2009, GO Transit has officially begun their bus service routes between Kitchener/Waterloo and Mississauga.

For about $12.30 CAD, I can take a bus from my campus to Square One in Mississauga at nearly any point in the day, 7 days a week.

No more Fedbus, no more Greyhound.

I think, GO Transit should make a killing off of this route, stealing quite a lot of business from our own Fedbus service.

我今term参加中文课。 就是Conversational Chinese 3在那个孔子学院。

不知道如果我记不记得去年的中文课。 可是很希望我在新加坡的时候让我有一点儿进度。

明天是第一课。 我真的想要参加但那时候也有一个Microsoft Info Session在Tatham中心。 现在我觉得找到工作比学中文是非常重要，所以明天我不能参加中文课。 糟糕啊。 可是生活就是生活。 你要对你自己决定什么东西有没有意思。 什么是最重要的？ 答案就是你自己知道的。

当然这时候我决定不太难的。 可是明天有什么决定？ 未来不一定的。 哎。。。 我太天真吗？

So it's been nearly two weeks since returning from Singapore. Adjusting back in terms of culture and what not hasn't been too big of an issue considering that as far as Asian countries go, Singapore is pretty modernized. I mean, it's cleaner than Toronto.

Things are of course different now. New house, and new faces. Heck even Oakville Transit is changed their bus routes last week.

I had been busying myself with unpacking and cleaning my room last week, and should have been working on my work report over the past week. On top of the work report, however, the next few days will also find me busied with gathering whatever provisions I need for returning to Waterloo. I will be moving in this Saturday.

4A is a bit of a surreal feeling in a way. I'm almost done. UW's Daily Bulletin is the default page opening in my email client, and today's top story is of arrival of all the new frosh. The headline photo depicts a mother carrying a box with presumably her son behind her returning to the car to fish out another load. The location of the photo is clearly V1, judging from the reddish-brown bricks with narrow windows visible at the fringe of the photo.

It is a photo of an event that is familiar to nearly every Waterloo student who otherwise lives in southern Ontario. A lot of me can't believe that it had been exactly four years ago since I was in the exact same situation.

And now looking at myself, I am nearing the end of my career at Waterloo. And having completed my exchange to Singapore is even more significant since it was just over four years to the date that I first ever envisioned going away for exchange while sitting at a general engineering info session somewhere inside RCH.

Now it's all over. Those four years of anticipation for the date that I'd fly off to study in a foreign country are now something of the past. The hope and fear of whether or not I'd be able to hold an average to be accepted into the exchange. The question of whether or not I'd be able to be selected given Singapore's popularity. The uncertainty of the application process. Using up a weeks worth of lunch breaks at Raytheon in order to gather all the required approval signatures required for the application. With respect to my application to NUS, the last minute fear of my renunciation of Singapore citizenship. All these were seemingly major steps in my eventual departurIt has been two weeks since I returned from Singapore. Eight months since I arrived in Singapore. One year since I received confirmation of my exchange. Nearly two years since I ran for UWCCF committee. Three years since I first stepped foot into UWCCF. Four years ago since I met my current housemates. Five years ago since I received my acceptance offer into UW. Six years ago since I submitted my OUAC application online to the University of Waterloo, the University of Toronto, and Wilfrid Laurier University. e for Singapore. But perhaps lingering in my mind a bit stronger however, is the actual time that I spent in Singapore. Never at the beginning of my career in Waterloo could I have imagined studying in Singapore, let alone working in Singapore. And yet it all came to pass as I was blessed with such an opportunity. I still remember sitting on the ground after a KEVII IHG volleyball practice suddenly realizing, that I had made it.

So here I am, back in Canada, left currently with primarily photos and Facebook contacts. Perhaps still quite naive about life. Yet probably not as naive as before. Hopefully not cynical.

Waterloo has pretty much been a blur.

A lot of pride has been shaken out of me. And perhaps I'm still trying to piece different thoughts and aspects of my life, both secular and spiritual, together.

It has been two weeks since I returned from Singapore. Eight months since I arrived in Singapore. One year since I received confirmation of my exchange. Nearly two years since I ran for UWCCF committee. Two years since I applied for exchange. Three years since I first stepped foot into UWCCF. Four years ago since I met my current housemates. Four years since I first planned to go on exchange. Five years ago since I received my acceptance offer into UW. Six years ago since I submitted my OUAC application online to the University of Waterloo, the University of Toronto, and Wilfrid Laurier University.

I cannot even begin to imagine how different things would be had I accepted U of T's offer for Engineering Science, as opposed to UW's offer for Systems Design.

And it's strange to see that my sister is about to embark on her own journey soon. OUAC and college applications are always due before the end of the year.

It's exam week here at NUS and I should be studying. But it's Saturday morning and I can't bring myself to right at this moment. Maybe after writing this entry, I will get cracking.

A lot of people ask me how different the schooling systems between Singapore and Canada. I suppose in particular, all I can answer to are NUS versus UW.

On the whole, I think typically once you reach the university level in any prestigious university, things are fairly similar at the end of the day. That said though, there are some differences between NUS' way of doing things compared to UW's way of doing things. And with respect to these, I like UW better.

First and probably most obvious is the aspect of competition. Perhaps it's a Singaporean thing in general, but NUS' marking scheme is all about competition. There are only a fixed number of A's and B's to go around. So in a nutshell, how the grading typically works is that a small top percentage of the class will receive A's, followed by B's, and then C's and D's. So you got a 95% on your Control Systems exam? Good for you. Everyone else got 99% - therefore you might end up with a C, or B at best.

In some ways, this is reflective of the real world. But it creates in me a sense of uneasiness, in that my best is never good enough. It also tends to create some nasty behaviours in students. According to one article in NUS' student publication, The Ridge, students have often been known to purposely misplace and hide library books such that their peers will not be able to find the necessary resources they will need to complete their assignments.

I admit that I even felt a bit questionable of my "niceness" towards other students. For example, in our EE2001 project, a couple of students from other groups were interested in my strain gauge instrumentation circuit. So being the friendly classmate I am, I gave them a bit of insight into what I had done. In general, this is a nice thing to do. But for the betterment of my grade in the class, it would have been more "politically correct" to not divulge any details about my work, or perhaps even give them incorrect information all together (so as to waste their time). On another occasion, another classmate in a different group was having difficulty in rigging up their RF transmitter/receiver circuit (which I had already spent considerable amount of time perfecting for our group's hardware). Again being the relatively friendly person I am, I gave the other group a helping hand by debugging some of their problems.

I don't know if the sentiment that "we're all in this together" is one that all the NUS students share? I know that it's often one that UW engineering students share. But if the performance of your peer directly and severely affects your own performance, that sentiment may dissolve completely.

The second difference I not after completing the majority of the course work seems to be the focus of the course material. I now feel that UW SYDE profs are of particularly high quality. This is not to say that NUS profs are bad. Only, I feel that the methods of teaching and the focuses of UW SYDE profs are better than those of the NUS engineering profs I've had so far.

It seems so far that most of the course material here focuses on a heavy amount of theory and "know how to." That is, there is heavy emphasis on being able to take a question and get an answer. A lot of emphasis on the final answer. This is not bad, and no doubt UW engineering has a certain degree of this as well. But what is missing I find is often the bigger picture. Some profs do manage to incorporate this, but I don't see this on as large and integrated of a scale that UW SYDE profs are able to pull off.

That is to say, UW SYDE seems to focus a lot of application of techniques rather than just the techniques themselves.

For example, a UW signals and systems course assignment question might be: given that a patient has hearing loss at this particular frequency, design a filter to correct this with a certain specified gain.

An NUS question might instead be: design a filter with the following cut-off frequencies.

At the end of the day, the questions will have the student churn out the same result. But the UW question has more depth, having the student design something based on a perceived need, rather than some numbers on paper.

Either way, I think I need to cut this deliberation short and get started on studying.