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!