Weekly Updates
It has been a very busy and fulfilling sixth and seventh week, work got so packed up that I haven't been able to squeeze out even a little time to write updates here, but here I am, although am late even for #7, I'm still writing.
There have been a few things that have been occupying my time like a hogger, and for two weeks I got so squeezed out that I mostly do not have time for myself and I didn't even have had proper rest.
Foreign Students' Week
It's a school's annual event where us foreign students in TKU holds a foreign students' week to introduce our country's food and culture and stuff to the mass public in our school. The event itself is primarily organised by the Overseas Chinese Students Association and the Indonesian Students Association this year, and for students from different countries, their respective students' association will be handling their part of the and I have been chosen to organise the Malaysian part of the whole event.
Work had to start before the Winter break mainly because we had to decide what kinds of Malaysian food we are going to put on sale at the venue, we had to buy it beforehand as we can only get it from Malaysia. But the real busy part actually starts around one month before the event itself, of course, some procrastination later I have only got about 2 weeks left to make all the preparations for the week-long event itself.
I had to make arrangements for my fellow Malaysians to be on-duty for the Malaysian area of the exhibition, which itself is a very time-consuming job considering most people chose the same timeframe, leaving most other timeframes in the void of anyone to be on-duty, it is very annoying, plus there is a lot of miscommunication between us and the main organiser regarding the starting and ending time of the exhibition which added another layer of work to be done.
FInishing duty-time table and I have to oversee many other things that are supposed to be overseen by my partner, well, I wouldn't want to bad mouth but in the end, I carried on most of the work that I am not assigned to do initially. It does get on my nerves sometimes that I am doing work that I am not supposed to be doing, and I had to do it because of the fact that my partner has done jacksh*t about anything, and someone has to do it.
Well, sometimes I do think that I am a person that is well-suited to do work on my own, I have always enjoyed doing work in a quiet office alone, without anyone to report to and stuff, I find doing my work like that gives me more freedom and I feel less constricted. Maybe it's because of this I haven't been learning how to communicate well with my fellow partners? There are many occasions during presentations that I just prepared the points to present and the PowerPoint slides itself while most of my teammates were just left aside waiting to do the presentation, I guess most students actually hate to do a presentation in front of the crowd, and they expect everyone else to do it, and most of the time if I am in their team they are lucky, I do all the work.
And for the foreign students' week, I guess maybe it's my inability to effectively communicate with my partner and this left her empty minded on what to do, or maybe she just couldn't care more! I don't know really haha.
Overall, getting involved in this event is really fun, I almost forgot how fun it is to actually organise events. I really learned a lot, especially on how to do work and stuff, I learned to try to communicate more with partners and stuff, as I realised that it is really very important to the success of something, you have to communicate on problems, and communicate on how to solve problems, I guess if there is this one thing I learned on #6 and #7, that's it.
Early Thesis Writing
For some reason, I have decided that I could actually start researching what I want to write for my thesis, I'm not sure if I really am going to write the actual thesis before my senior year but I thought in case I really did it before my Senior year, I might have a honeymoon year during my senior year.
I have been thinking about writing a thesis in the field of linguistics, since my major is the Japanese language, the scope of what I can write is fairly limited to cultural stuff, or literature, or linguistics. I have been quite interested in the scientific study of language since quite some time ago, well, I've been loving science forever. I thought I can do some studies about language, and I choose to do language comparison between Malay (my national language) and Cebuano (Joyce's native tongue).
For quite some time I have been quite interested in the Austronesian family of languages and I happen to have a girlfriend who speaks an Austronesian language besides Malay, it really got me very interested in the language family (to be honest, I thought Malay only started existing about 500 years ago before I learned about Cebuano and the Austronesian languages).
These two weeks has been very busy and very fulfilling for me, and I might have learned some very important life lesson from it too!
Well, this semester is going to be so busy, like every other semester before this, but I think I am getting more productivity this week because I am feeling like I am getting a hang out of not procrastinating!
#6 #7 Productivity Overload Week
Productivity Overload Week
...or busyness overload week
It has been a very busy and fulfilling sixth and seventh week, work got so packed up that I haven't been able to squeeze out even a little time to write updates here, but here I am, although am late even for #7, I'm still writing.
There have been a few things that have been occupying my time like a hogger, and for two weeks I got so squeezed out that I mostly do not have time for myself and I didn't even have had proper rest.
Foreign Students' Week
It's a school's annual event where us foreign students in TKU holds a foreign students' week to introduce our country's food and culture and stuff to the mass public in our school. The event itself is primarily organised by the Overseas Chinese Students Association and the Indonesian Students Association this year, and for students from different countries, their respective students' association will be handling their part of the and I have been chosen to organise the Malaysian part of the whole event.
Work had to start before the Winter break mainly because we had to decide what kinds of Malaysian food we are going to put on sale at the venue, we had to buy it beforehand as we can only get it from Malaysia. But the real busy part actually starts around one month before the event itself, of course, some procrastination later I have only got about 2 weeks left to make all the preparations for the week-long event itself.
I had to make arrangements for my fellow Malaysians to be on-duty for the Malaysian area of the exhibition, which itself is a very time-consuming job considering most people chose the same timeframe, leaving most other timeframes in the void of anyone to be on-duty, it is very annoying, plus there is a lot of miscommunication between us and the main organiser regarding the starting and ending time of the exhibition which added another layer of work to be done.
FInishing duty-time table and I have to oversee many other things that are supposed to be overseen by my partner, well, I wouldn't want to bad mouth but in the end, I carried on most of the work that I am not assigned to do initially. It does get on my nerves sometimes that I am doing work that I am not supposed to be doing, and I had to do it because of the fact that my partner has done jacksh*t about anything, and someone has to do it.
Well, sometimes I do think that I am a person that is well-suited to do work on my own, I have always enjoyed doing work in a quiet office alone, without anyone to report to and stuff, I find doing my work like that gives me more freedom and I feel less constricted. Maybe it's because of this I haven't been learning how to communicate well with my fellow partners? There are many occasions during presentations that I just prepared the points to present and the PowerPoint slides itself while most of my teammates were just left aside waiting to do the presentation, I guess most students actually hate to do a presentation in front of the crowd, and they expect everyone else to do it, and most of the time if I am in their team they are lucky, I do all the work.
And for the foreign students' week, I guess maybe it's my inability to effectively communicate with my partner and this left her empty minded on what to do, or maybe she just couldn't care more! I don't know really haha.
Overall, getting involved in this event is really fun, I almost forgot how fun it is to actually organise events. I really learned a lot, especially on how to do work and stuff, I learned to try to communicate more with partners and stuff, as I realised that it is really very important to the success of something, you have to communicate on problems, and communicate on how to solve problems, I guess if there is this one thing I learned on #6 and #7, that's it.
Early Thesis Writing
For some reason, I have decided that I could actually start researching what I want to write for my thesis, I'm not sure if I really am going to write the actual thesis before my senior year but I thought in case I really did it before my Senior year, I might have a honeymoon year during my senior year.
I have been thinking about writing a thesis in the field of linguistics, since my major is the Japanese language, the scope of what I can write is fairly limited to cultural stuff, or literature, or linguistics. I have been quite interested in the scientific study of language since quite some time ago, well, I've been loving science forever. I thought I can do some studies about language, and I choose to do language comparison between Malay (my national language) and Cebuano (Joyce's native tongue).
For quite some time I have been quite interested in the Austronesian family of languages and I happen to have a girlfriend who speaks an Austronesian language besides Malay, it really got me very interested in the language family (to be honest, I thought Malay only started existing about 500 years ago before I learned about Cebuano and the Austronesian languages).
For this, I have actually been talking to a Professor in my department regarding this, and he's good enough to support me doing this, for some reason, and luckily enough, I happened to have met a PhD student in my school from Cebu, who is also quite interested in the theme I am planning to do on, she has offered to contact me up with some of her friends currently teaching at UP and Universit of San Carlos, both in Cebu, whom expertise are in Cebuano history and language, to help me out with my studies.
To be honest, I do not know if I am capable of doing such studies for my undergraduate thesis, but I am very interested in a theme that I think I'd continue on it. I've signed up for some basic linguistics courses on MOOCs online to give myself some fundamentals on the subject of linguistics. God, I don't know if I am crazy but I really am doing this? It's hard to say if this will actually be what comes out on my thesis, but I don't really see this as something unnecessary that I am doing, I really see this as doing something I am interested in.
These two weeks has been very busy and very fulfilling for me, and I might have learned some very important life lesson from it too!
Well, this semester is going to be so busy, like every other semester before this, but I think I am getting more productivity this week because I am feeling like I am getting a hang out of not procrastinating!
