Wallflower

I really do feel quite like a wallflower at work, mainly because I'm lunching with a group of more senior colleagues. They are all nice ladies, and kind too. They try to include me in their conversations, but it's either I cannot catch on or don't know what to say. So I sit there and eat quietly, or smile and make a remark occasionally.

I feel that we could have a good conversation if there's just 2-3 of them at a table. But a group of 6 (with me 7), is rather hard for a newcomer (and an intern at that) to be talkative.

However, I'm really thankful for their presence in the office - at least it makes me feel that I know more people :) And they share the food they make and stuff like that too. Generally their conversations are quite diverse and un-shallow, which makes it fun to listen. I appreciate the fact that they do talk as normal when I'm with them, instead of hushing up sensitive topics.

I don't know how I really got to join them for lunch. It all started when my two other colleagues (now working shift and unable to lunch with me) were late one day, and then I saw this nice lady that I chatted to in the lift sitting alone. She was from the office next to mine. So I asked if I could sit down too. And lo and behold, more of them appeared and that made 7 people! But then I kept on joining them all the same.

Schering-Plough do have very nice workers. There was this lady who was driving a yellow car from one plant to another, and stopped to fetch me when she saw me walking with an umbrella in that direction. She had never seen me at all. In fact she was working in a different plant. However she was very friendly, and nice to chat with. She showed me another way into my plant, and there we parted. My greatest regret was: I forgot to ask her name. I will remember to ask for people's names next time. Usually after I do that I double check the spelling on my telephone directory list to enforce my memory. It's always good to remember people's faces and names :) It makes them closer to you in a way, and somehow it makes me feel I belong.

I do wish I'm less of a wallflower. But wallflowers do appreciate kind people, so the main purpose of writing this is to remind myself that there's such a nice group of people in my office who were willing to try their best to make me part of them, and generously share the company and food they have; at least in that one-hour we have lunch together everyday. :) Hopefully I'm not too much of a bore, and would be able to open myself up soon.

Won Over

God's love and grace never left my home. Every knot is getting untied slowly but surely. We used to be such a family of problems. But now, I'm so glad that we are different, although it's such a long journey. And the journey still goes on, but in the end, Love wins. Thank God for today. Thank God for love and grace.

And I want to say I'm so proud of someone and I hope I could always be proud of her like this :)

Returning a Favor

This is the mysterious blog of my Mysterious Senior. Haha. Too bad I can't return the favor in the 'kua zhang' way you did to promo my blog, but this is the best I can do! I don't know how to get the picture thingy done. =p

By the way, the prospects of getting a hand-written thank-you note is exciting. Hmms :)

More work updates: I've finally gotten briefed about my project! :) Still carrying on with the admin work as usual along with that. Wai Pheng's people and paperwork skills that I picked up from the Staff Club days as well as during OMC worked well. Thank God for her good example.

And I had a CME practice two days back! True it wasn't like the good old days when we were a crowd, but just Andrew (conductor), Jinq Horng (violinist), and Shawn (cellist), with me was fun enough. Jon might be joining with the bass too. I miss Farid especially during this time. Andrew reminded me of Farid's spark of passion for CME when he was here (and how he egged me to be the next Chairperson after him). I'm so glad Andrew is taking over CME. And I'm happy to be playing again!

Somehow I never get myself out of CME although I always intended to. In Year 1, I wanted to overload Unplugged, but got into CME. In Year 2, I wanted to quit CME and try something new, but got psycho-ed by Farid plus other seniors to Chair it instead! In Year 3, the members of CME was pitifully few, and as ex-chairperson, what else could I do but help out right?! And even in my final year, I'm performing for orientation! But I do enjoy it, our songs and practices are smashing! LOL. I sound so enthu.

I still haven't gotten used to the 6 am plus wake hours, so I need to sleep soon. Ta :)

Weekend Post

Working make weekends more special than ever. And unlike schooling, where I have to mug 7 days a week, now I only have weekends for leisure purposes!

These two days were fun. Yesterday I went shopping (didn't buy anything) with Wing Mei and Tirza in Paya Lebar. Then we had ice-cream dessert in Bugis, and a walk in Marina Bay. Dinner with Tirza in City Hall. We were practically walking for 8 hours straight or more, and standing in the MRT. I was so glad I had my sports shoes on. Unlike Tirza, my leg muscles were sore at night, partially due to the fact that I've been running for bus 183 which involves rushing through slopes and stairs throughout the week. But today my legs felt really fine. Ready for another week of running again.

Today Boss and Wing Mei surprised us by turning up in GLCC. We went to De-coders (with Jon and Joanne also), a board games center; and if you didn't catch me mentioning this before, I LOVE boardgames. We wasted a lot of time starting-off and playing Settlers of Cartan, but it was quite worth it. Wish I had known how to strategize earlier though. Then we played No Mercy and Saboteur.

That was the fun part of the week. Not-so-happy things happened also, things that I'll rather not mention in a public blog. Things that I feel that I have a part to do with, and should I have been braver and truer to my heart for the past few years, I could possibly have done a part to prevent. Anyway two lessons learnt:

1. Friendship is a wonderful thing, but one needs to ever be discerning, even if surrounded by the sincerest, most well-intentioned friends.

2. One should never hesitate to point out the flaws of others in love; even if one knows that he/she is not perfect himself/herself. This was the mistake I made, and sadly, I'm not the only one paying the price.

It is always not easy to do the right thing. And it is not always rewarding either. But some things that must be done, should be done.

Work updates: My workload comes in short bursts, and I need to find a way of staying alert from 8-10 am. Usually I avoid reading and try to walk around during that time, but sometimes there isn't really much walking around to do. I'm thankful for my supervisor being nice and kind, but I do wish I am able to have more common conversational topics with my other colleagues. They are kind and open to communication, but somehow we don't have much in common due to a light generation gap, and I'm still rather shy of them.

I did think a lot about the 'asking for things to do' part, but then again, I didn't want to hamper other people's progress by doing too many follow-up phone calls (e.g. interrupting meetings), or asking questions at the wrong time. Somehow people seem to be constantly on the phone or in a conversation.

That's all for this weekend's updates. By the way I'm really enjoying Agatha Christie's writings. Every story draws a new breath. She really is a creative writer.

Artic in Sahara

This is the condition of my workplace.

Singapore is like Sahara now. Except Sahara is probably not humid. It is so hot even at 6 am in the morning! Unbearable.

Fortunately, or unfortunately (I don't know which is more apt), my office freezes like Artic. Thankfully I do not sit right under the air con. And thankfully it's just my office so I could always go to other parts of the building to warm up a bit, if I'm desperate.

Air-con seriously reduces my productivity. For someone who rarely goes toilet, I take an hourly break a day (I sit right at the door and the toilet is nice and clean a few steps away). The air-con is so cold that I keep on having to drink hot water to warm myself up (and wrap my bare hands around the hot cup). Today I was rather engrossed in typing and didn't do that, so in the end my fingers ended up really numb. I couldn't type, and I couldn't write until lunch hour came, and I went down to the canteen to de-frost my fingers. Almost couldn't hold my utensils properly too. However after lunch it was not so bad. I guess the calories matter. Literally burning them up haha.

Anyway with the exception of the over-cold temperature, I like my office seat. It is right at the door, means easy access to the water dispenser and cooler. And it's easy for my friends to say hi when they walk past the door, and for people going out to say hi to me too (met many people through that way). Otherwise, interns are rather isolated.

And yay, handed in FYP report yesterday. I regret to say I didn't have much time to check though. And I addressed my professor as 'Associate' instead of 'Assistant' (after asking Yew Hong to check his own)! He sent me an email to clarify. So paiseh. I did that twice, once on the cover page, another in the acknowledgements.

Oh well, at least I saw his first email smiley through this, and he said 'associate sounds better!'. Thankfully I didn't under-address him. That would be really bad. =p

I visited Jurong Library today after work too. Must make use of my $10 investment to borrow books! Ended up with Agatha Christie, after running away from the Chem Eng section. =p The library is a nice place to escape from the sweltering heat too :)

So that's all, I'm going to read the book I borrowed now.

靠著耶穌得勝

Hue Wen shared this song on Facebook today and tagged me.

I remember my first encounter with this song. It was from the album produced by 小羊诗歌, in which has many nice songs that I really liked. A fresh change from Stream of Praise at that time. And I like this song because it brims with hopefulness. Also, it reminds me of Charissa because she introduced this song to the church when she led worship.

I guess I was more or less influenced by this song when I composed 凡事都能做. It was my one and only composed worship song which has been brought out in public, although only for a while. I still remember that day when the church choir sang it. I was in Singapore, but they were singing it in Tampin. Because of this event, the song also reminded me of Mummy and Charissa. Mummy video-recorded the choir singing it and posted it on her Multiply album. Charissa msn-d me about it, and even sent me voice clips singing the chorus of the song. I saved those voice-clips and they are still with me in this laptop. I am very thankful I did, and am thankful that even if my song has not been used for too many things, God was graceful enough to let it contain memories of love for Mummy and Charissa.

Back in those days Philippians 4:13 was my favorite verse. I haven't been claiming it a lot now though. Been tired, and in turmoil, struggling over certain things. Complacency has taken over me. Today pastor preached that there is not much time left. Every second has to be converted to eternity. I pray that I should do that conversion wisely, starting even now. I pray that I will be able to do this, for Philippians 4:13 says 'I can do all things through Christ who gives me strength'.

I still believe in Philippians 4:13. I pray that it will be seen through my life.

Writing non-stop

I generally do not loathe writing reports. It is at most, lots of tedious formatting, sentence-generating, referencing, table-designing and graph-sizing; but it requires no creativity on my part (unlike writing Phoenix articles), or too much thinking/programming. So my right brain could be dead and tired, but my left brain will churn things out. Of course there are a lot of tricky things like tenses (I always get them mixed up), and the need to vary your words a bit so that the same verb/term which is not a technical term does not appear in 30-50% of your report, and cause whoever is reading it to get turned off (at least I'm the type that does). I had lots of training in the past few semesters since I'm mainly in-charge of writing for almost all my group projects.

However, I do not like doing it within a stipulated time-limit, especially when I have less than 5 days to write, edit and print (including work-days). Thank God my professor doesn't like ultra-long and detailed reports, and asked us to stick within 30-50 pages, which is the length of my usual lab reports, and hence, is very much manageable. :) Am grateful to Nick for his report skeleton too (though the content has totally nothing to do with mine). At least I do not have to wreck my brains thinking out the cover page formatting from scratch, and fear that I have forgotten any formatting details or report sections.

These two days I shall exhibit in full blast all my report-writing capabilities, and hopefully by Tuesday night, it shall be over. :)

FYP ending soon

Counting down 4 days plus plus to complete my report! It's really rushed, but it's a kind of rush that makes me 'high' (at least for now).

Our last FYP consultation meeting is just over today, and this is here's a pic of Mei and myself with our mentor Bevan. I don't know how to resize the picture, so this looks weird. Anyway, you can see all of us in it. We were really very fortunate to get Bevan as a mentor. He's very patient in explaining things, doesn't push/stress us out, provides us with literature info as best as he could; and most importantly, I know he did not just help us because we were involved in his project. I really appreciated the fact that he was very mindful of our interests as FYP students, and I learned a lot from this project.

After this half-year FYP experience, I shall take a leaf from his book and be more patient with others (no matter what the issue is). Yes. I shall even try to be patient with the 183 bus driver who literally makes the bus crawl on Clementi's road on my way to work, getting stuck at all the red lights when it's already all jammed up, and making me nearly miss the shuttle bus to work. Maybe when this happens to me again, I'll just think of how patient Bevan was when I asked him near-elementary questions, and I'll tolerate the poor bus driver more.

FYP would have been so different without Mei too. We're the type that like to rant together! And it's fun to have someone else under the same professor and mentor instead of being on my own. Now Mei is working in MSD South and I'm in MSD West. So we somewhat have another common topic to talk about when we see each other.

We didn't really have much actual meet-ups with our Professor, but what I like about him is that he tries his best to help and get us interested in the project, and believes the best there are in people. In fact he has more confidence in us than we have in ourselves. Usually when this happens, I will think that this is because 'he hasn't seen our report yet', which may be true. But this time I shall take it a different way, and learn to have more confidence in what I can do too. :) I tried adopting this mindset in my work place and it seems to have put me in brighter spirits.

So now I shall try not to have such a phobia of new and 'difficult' stuff, and learn to make the most of what I have! And now I'll have to somehow churn out a beautiful report for the little data I have. :) All the best to other FYP students too!

Internship Starts!

This week is my first week as an intern in Schering-Plough (or SP, now brought over by Merck and is officially MSD-West). I feel so blessed by everything I went through these four days!

I am not supposed to blog about anything regarding the work I'm doing so I shall omit all names and not mention the nature of my work (which I haven't really started doing yet). Will just share the overall feeling of what this place gives me.

I had my first day in MSD-South (or Merck) for orientation. It was a very well-planned orientation and I was very happy when they highlighted Merck's value systems, and emphasized it's importance to us. 'Values' of giving only the best to the people (Merck is a pharmaceutical company), are more important than 'skills', which many other companies pay more attention to. The Merck organization is extremely value-driven since its founding, and I feel proud to be a part of it, even though I'm just an intern.

Some people get the kick out of their job because it's challenging and they excel in it. My satisfaction from this job comes from the fact that I know the whole organization is encouraged to pull together to help people, not just for profits and fame.

Another thing I like about Merck is it's cafeteria. Free salad on Mondays, free fruits and drinks everyday! Free drinks in the pantry too. And the food is NICE and inexpensive. Too bad I won't be eating there everyday haha. I haven't really tried much of SP's canteen food yet, but it is a bit more expensive than Merck.

The employees in both Merck and SP are very kind and friendly. I made friends with a few new employees on contract basis who underwent the same orientation as me, and were around my age. They have been around since June though, and are more familiar with the place. Hence, when I was in SP, they baby-sitted me around when the HR assistant was not free. (I suppose they treat me as if I'm much younger because they thought I was from Polytechnic at first, and one of the uncles actually asked me if I was 16 or 17.) They showed me where the canteen and toilet were, directed me to the shuttle bus waiting area, and agreed to drop by my office for lunch because they didn't want me eating alone, although we were working in different areas. (We couldn't use our phones as the reception is very low, and in some places, phones are not allowed.) Even the chemists in lab took the trouble to show me around, and senior employees I was not working under voluntarily introduced themselves and asked me to approach them any time if I needed help.

I'm very thankful to be under my current supervisor too, who is very kind and approachable. When I was at the pantry this morning waiting for her arrival, one of the other colleagues in the office talked to me and said I was very lucky to be under her, as she will make sure I'd learn a lot. And judging from what the things she told me that I would be doing, I think I really will.

I finally managed to navigate around the plant I'm working in in SP today without getting lost. Everyone knows I have a bad sense of direction! It was so extreme the past two days that wherever I need to go, I had to follow someone around (or ask people). I suppose I was getting rather burdensome, especially on the HR assistant who had his own work to do. He brought the bunch of us out for lunch, and this time I managed to remember the directions to the hawker center properly. :) But I guess I won't be going out much, as canteen food is still relatively cheaper.

I'm looking forward to next week where the sequence of day-job night-FYP is going to be over! And I look forward to tomorrow as well, because on Fridays we go home half an hour earlier! :D The start of this internship looks promising. I hope it will end fruitfully as well.