So much has happened over the last two months, I wonder how I'm going to squeeze it all in. Three main things I guess: MTI internship, Caderas and Bailamos, and then academics and other school stuff that have happened so far this term.
As I mentioned the last time, my internship at MTI was really tough. Not because the project was too difficult for me to handle, but because the timeframe was so tight and the constraints on the completeness and timeliness of arrival of the data I needed that I didn’t have time to synthesize all the little interesting findings I made. The end result was that the final product was something that I wasn’t really proud to put my name on. Well, maybe I did have difficulty handling it – very early on there was a problem with comparability of data from different countries because I ran up against the nominal-real issue and exchange rates – if I had had a little more experience about how to adjust my data to account for these discrepancies the end result might not have been so convoluted.
But strangely enough, when I finally went back to give a presentation on my project findings it seemed to go surprisingly well. About halfway through my presentation people got really interested in my animated bubble charts that I figured out how to do in Excel, as well as my inter-country comparison, which I had gone through several calculations in order to obtain. I felt it was all very fluffy and disjointed, but in the 45 minutes that I was speaking it seemed relatively well-received. So thankfully, I'm all done with that now – I learnt that I quite like the idea of working with data and doing research, just perhaps not in the public sector… seriously considering an academic career path right now. But we’ll see.
Dance has been another headache over the last few months, albeit a marginally more enjoyable one. The main sticking point has been the fact that the Salsa choreography that we did for Bailamos was the toughest I have ever attempted. About two months before performance day, I strained my wrist while practicing the final trick (which basically involves carrying the girl straight up, placing her on my shoulders, holding one of her legs while allowing the other to whirl around in a turn, catching her and then putting her down into a side dip), and I was struggling with it ever since. Saw a TCM doctor, saw a GP, got wrist guards, plasters, and took Panadol regularly every day the week before the performance. It took so much out of me that now that the performance is over, I honestly am thinking about stopping Salsa and enjoy the rest of my life as a regular Joe. Instead of a Latin-dancing sexy wannabe Joe.
But the performance came off really well, and the sense of achievement was insane. Here are some shots – not very good ones of course. Oh! - I must add - Charlotte, my partner for this piece, was just amazing throughout the whole training process. Took all my nonsense and even gave me back some of her own; not too slack and not too on, and it all turned out a lot better than I expected. Thanks Charlotte.





Some other cool stuff has happened in Caderas. First of all, we’re gearing up for a split between Latin and Salsa. Which some people found regrettable, including myself. If Salsa and Latin hadn’t been part of the same club in SMU I think there would have been precious little chance that I’d have joined both. But when I look at the way the club has evolved over the last three years I can't help but feel that this is inevitable. People are just not interested in what’s happening on the other side of the wall anymore. Honestly, I don’t blame them. It’s really hard to maintain continuity and consistency in this club; I feel we are lurching from one event to another and it’s a miracle that we manage to achieve anything beautiful at all – praise God! Secondly, we are finally going to execute our first ever JC outreach dance workshop thingy. This will see some 60 JC students coming down to the ACC for a Caderas101-style event, and hopefully we will get them interested in our school and the dance scene therein. I'm in charge of that, and honestly I'm so slack I think we’ll need another miracle to get it off the ground. But we’ll see.
Finally, academics. Decided to take up 6 modules again this semester because I honestly feel slack doing 5. Say whatever you like. I originally intended by 6th module to be ECON305 Advanced Mathematical Methods, but after 1.5 lessons I felt really lost, so I decided to just walk out without even bidding for it. Even sold off my brand-new textbook as a commitment mechanism. Instead I signed up for an Operations Management Independent Study on Sales and Operations Planning, which honestly sounds really cool. But what’s really cool about it is that it’s a 2-for-1 deal – it’s an Ops Mgmt Elective module which sees me and a partner and my Prof doing research on Sales and Operations Planning, and then writing a paper about it. It’ll then snowball into an internship in the summer, so I hit quite a lot of bases for effort that isn’t quite proportional to the outcome – in a positive sense. A little hairy because at times I really feel out of my depth but I'm sure it’ll all turn out dandily in the end.
Chinese New Year just passed. Sharon was able to join the gathering of the relatives on my dad’s side – I was really happy! I think she and my cousins really “click”! But then I mixed up the ang pows that I was holding for both of us, and she ended up “earning” more than me. Sigh.
Apart from that, I realize that this is already the middle of Term 2! That means I'm roughly 70% through my university education. That’s actually really sad because I enjoy school so much. Only now do I feel that I have the credibility to undertake a lot of cool stuff like thesis, independent study, exchange, internship etc., but there’s just enough time to do all that. Nor is there enough money to extend my stay here in SMU – well, maybe there is, somewhere, but my scholarship runs out after 4 years, and I need to start earning some cash so I can get married anyway. Sigh. Hopefully I can come back to school after a few years of actual work and commence on my very alluring academic career path.