Lazy. Lazy to finish my art project. Lazy to practise guitar. Lazy to study for SAT II. Lazy to play basketball. Lazy to read. i'm so lazy lately. Been investing most of my time gunning down foes of Max Payne in slow-mo and uniting China under Cao Cao (say, his name does look funny this way). But HEY! The World Book Fair is here again! So let me haul my lazy ass down to Suntec for some serious treasure-hunting.

Secondly, on the issue of money. i've decided that it is terribly inefficient for me to earn money at this stage. Although tuitions seemingly pay well, divided out over the total number of hours i work each day, the marginal rate of return is pathetically low. Furthermore, compared with future income, i'm certainly underpaid no matter how hard i try. Therefore, from now on, i shall continue to humble myself by taking my parents' doughs and try not to feel too ashamed about it. Then i'd spend the time doing all those things i have been too lazy to do, maybe.

Lastly, on headache. If God created everything, did He create headache as well? Or is headache an evil tool of the Devil to corrupt Man's mind? It does not make sense to me, 'cos everytime i wake up with a headache i'd call upon God. i'd say, "Oh God this is great this is just great please don't let it be true let it be my imagination." And then i sit up and it's still there then i stand up and it's still there then i get dressed and walked out of the door barely opening my eyes and it's still there. Then i know for sure that it's not my imagination. God i hate headaches.  ¶

17:30 |

 

i was at the Singapore Techonologies scholarship presentation today. Saying it this way sounds funny, as if i happened to be there. Well, the fact is i am one of the proud recipients (another one of those cliches) of the overseas scholarships. There are 13 ST scholars this year (but only 12 attended), out of which 10 are from RJ. i guess if i were one of other 2 guys i would feel quite x-ed. The ST CEO had a habit of speaking v e r y slowly, which was very dangerous. If he spoke any slower or any longer i'd have fallen asleep. And then it was that irksome put-on-your-plastic-smile mingling time again. If one day i could do that well i'd go work for the UN. But luckily it was over soon enough, and a quick hop down to Taka for 3 takopachi and a DQ double cone was a pleasing reward for standing around all afternoon and saying 'thank you' to people i don't even know.  ¶

21:12 |

 

Oh my oh my, Raffles Junior College was featured on The Wall Street Journal (NOT Asian Wall Street Journal). Anything to be proud of? i don't think so.


Gateway to the Ivy League --- Prestigious Singapore School Sends Droves to Top Colleges; Just $15 a Month in Fees

By Cris Prystay and Elizabeth Bernstein
1,188 words
6 May 2004
The Wall Street Journal
B1
English
(Copyright (c) 2004, Dow Jones & Company, Inc.)

TEH SU CHING began gunning for the Ivy League when she was just 11 years old. To get there, the young Singaporean beefed up her grades to win admission to a feeder school for Singapore's Raffles Junior College, the government school that landed her older brother in the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and other graduates in a host of top universities abroad.

A few weeks ago, Ms. Teh, now 19, was accepted by Yale. "I screamed when I found out," she says. Then she went down to Raffles and gave her teachers flowers and bottles of wine.

The school has plenty of reason to celebrate. Over 40% of the 820 students who graduated in December have been accepted by top U.S. universities. About half of that group will attend elite, Ivy League schools. Cornell University alone accepted 90 of Ms. Teh's classmates; Duke University accepted another 24. Dozens of others this year have been accepted by Britain's Oxford and Cambridge.

Raffles charges students just $15 a month in fees, but it's no ordinary institution. A product of Singapore's highly competitive approach to education, designed to fuel the national economy, Raffles is the peak of a government-controlled pyramid-style school structure that unabashedly pushes the cream to the top.

Starting with a "primary-school leaving exam" that helps determine what secondary school a child gets into, Singapore's system includes four years of basic secondary school followed by an exam that determines what junior college one attends for two years of preuniversity schooling. By the time they graduate, Raffles students have an extra year of schooling compared with U.S. teens.

Another key to Raffles' extraordinary college-placement success: Money is no object. To groom leaders for its agencies and the companies under its control, the government underwrites the college education of hundreds of top Singaporean junior-college graduates. Students seeking such aid must sign a contract, or a bond, to come back and work for a government agency or corporation for six years. More than half of the Raffles grads who are heading to the U.S. this year are on a government bond, the school says.

"It makes it a little easier for us to accept them," acknowledges Mike Goldberger, director of admission at Brown University, which has a limited financial-aid budget for international students.

Raffles Junior College, established in 1982, has its roots in Raffles Institution, a secondary school for boys established in 1823 by Sir Stamford Raffles, the colonial Briton who founded the city-state of Singapore. Raffles Institution, which still exists, built its reputation as a bastion of meritocracy, accepting gifted children from all socioeconomic classes and producing dozens of leaders over the years -- among them, Lee Kuan Yew, the patriarch of modern Singapore.

Today's Raffles is an Ivy League machine. A recent Wall Street Journal survey of high schools that feed elite U.S. colleges focused on U.S. schools and thus didn't include Raffles. Adding international schools, that list shows that Raffles sent more students to 10 elite colleges than any other international school and topped such prestigious U.S. secondary schools as Choate Rosemary Hall in Wallingford, Conn., and Harvard-Westlake, in North Hollywood, Calif.

"It's very satisfying," says Winston James Hodge, the school's principal and a Singaporean like most of the faculty.

To attract top talent to its island economy, Singapore also offers scholarships to bright teens from across Asia. Anand Bhaskar, 18 years old, is one of 100 foreign students at the school. Most are from China, Malaysia and India and attended Raffles on full scholarship. Cornell not only offered Mr. Bhaskar, the only child of a financial consultant and a bank officer in Pune, India, a spot this year, but a partial scholarship, too. "I'm pretty excited," he says.

Cornell is pretty happy about the match, too. "What most of us want is a diverse community, a broad base of international students," says Wendy Schaerer, senior associate director, undergraduate admissions, at Cornell. "We also look at how well they perform here. The students we enroll from Raffles have done very well."

Very, very well. Mr. Bhaskar, for example, offers much more than the 1550 he scored (out of a possible 1600) on his SATs, or the straight A's he earned on his final exams. An active member of the math and computer clubs, he also danced in shows put on by the Indian cultural club at Raffles and tutored children at a day-care center in his free time.

Likewise, Ms. Teh edited a school magazine, played softball for the Raffles team, and performed street music for charity during school holidays.

At Raffles, as at most schools in Singapore, math and science are stressed. Just 8% of Raffles students major in humanities, and almost all of them still take advanced math courses as one of their four subjects.

To make sure students are more than just math machines, the school encourages them to join at least three clubs or teams, ranging from water polo to the economic and current affairs society, and do charity work. Last year, a group of students raised money and went to Cambodia to help refurbish a drop-in center for street kids.

University applications are taken extra-seriously. There are five teachers who serve as applications advisers, two for U.S. universities, two for schools in the United Kingdom and one for Australian schools. Between July and October, there is at least one talk each week by Ivy League alumni or an admissions officer from a U.S. school.

Those talks motivated Ervin Yeo, 20, now a freshman at Yale studying ethics, politics and economics. "When you hear all these success stories and hear about the students before you who go on to Princeton and Harvard, you feel you can be part of this," says Mr. Yeo, who is the first in his immediate family to go to college.

The government is backing Mr. Yeo, whose mother works in a supermarket and father in an electronics shop. He was given a scholarship by the Ministry of Foreign Affairs, which also allowed him to defer mandatory two-year army service until he finishes college.

Mr. Yeo, who played rugby at Raffles and now does so at Yale, says the transition has been easy. "You're used to being the cream of the crop in Singapore," he says, "and it's just the same thing at the Ivies."


Corrections & Amplifications

RAFFLES JUNIOR COLLEGE in Singapore estimates that a quarter of the 820 students who graduated in December 2003 were accepted to U.S. universities, about half of those by top schools. A Marketplace article Thursday incorrectly said 40% had been accepted to U.S. universities. Also, Raffles students graduate in 12 years. The article incorrectly said Raffles students have an extra year of schooling compared with their U.S. counterparts.

(WSJ May 12, 2004)

(END)  ¶

18:42 |

 

Bluepen has been more than a little quiet lately, partly because of his ever so mundane life, partly because his brain is preoccupied with his new laptop a.k.a. ultimate gaming machine, and partly because he thinks that nobody reads these stuffs he writes anyway, except maybe a soul or two, and that's including himself. But latest meet-up with Suan Siong and Troy made my last Sunday interesting enough to be blogged.

God knows when was the last time i stepped into a cinema (i think it was Last Samurai). Disappointment with Hollywood trashes and the economy of buying vcds from VideoEzy kept me away from forking out two meals to watch a film in the dark room. But Troy is quite worthy of two meals at worst. It's not cheesy, doesn't act cool or sophisticated, and is quite action-packed. By action-packed i don't mean muscle brutes hacking one another through out the two hours and forty minutes. It's packed because the storyline flows rather nicely and i couldn't feel an obvious hiatus anywhere. The final invasion of Greeks into Troy even faintly reminds of the US-led invasion into Iraq, when the statues of Trojan kings were pulled down. But even Greek warriors, who by today's standards stood little above barbarians, could treat their enemies with honour and respect.

The only regret is that the film oversimplifies things. It made it seem as if the Trojan War ignited overnight and lasted for less than a fortnight. In actual fact, or rather as accounted by Homer, Agamemnon took three years to gather his fleet of a thousand ships, and the war itself took a total of 10 years and none of the Greek kings lived to enjoy the fruit of their victory. ("For nine years thou shall fight, but no victory shall be in the Greek's hands. In the tenth year Troy would fall, but none of thee would live to return to thy lands").

One special moment during the movie though, was a scene featuring Briseis (Rose Byrne), princess of Troy and lover of Achilles, who looked so like someone familiar...  ¶

09:01 |

 

The Spanish Apartment now stands at my second favourite movie of all time. i can't think of a better word than saucy to describe it, but at the same time it's also subtly witty and hilariously funny. And it's in French so for all those keen in the language, it's a double-pleasure! Anyway i'm so hooked on foreign movies now, beside which Hollywood blasts and explosions and special effects pale in comparison. There is another French show called The Game we watched during GP in first year. If anyone finds it, please get it for me! :)

Oh and the story of how i got the movie on vcd... *clears throat* Let me bring this joyous tiding: VideoEZY is selling used vcd at 3 for $12 and they do have very good selections. i also bought Chicago, Gangs of New York, Road to Perdition, Analyze That and Rabbit-Proof Fence (another foreign movie). Now i'm all set for a movie marathon!  ¶

23:32 |