an "exciting" life ahead?

Wow. Today was like somehow cool. Why do i say so? Anyone heard of URECA? URECA stands for Undergraduate Research Experience on CAmpus. The opportunity of being a researcher is given to students with good academic grades. Students who are selected are able to take up one of the project that promises up to $4,000 per year with the input of 400 hours. So, basically, its doing research as your part-time job with a pay rate of $10/hr. But here is the catch. It is considered a MODULE! Yup, 3 AUs that is. However, an S/U option will be available. Phew.

I went for the URECA talk this afternoon and had some surprising findings. Only 5 local students from computer engineering managed to got onto the list. Yup. That was what my friend saw on the list. But in actual fact, we did not managed to find anyone who is a local computer engineer other than both of us. For computer science, just local students, we saw a whooping 5 of them attending the talk. I was like, "WtF?". Come on, the number of students in computer engineering are far more than the number of computer science students. I got 4.5 overall GPA and was, if my friend was not wrong, 1 of the 5 selected for this talk, where we only felt the presence of 2 in fact. 2 out of 400, and there are already 5 local computer science students who were present. They got like a batch of less than a 100 students in their course? Come on, whoever says that computer engineering is easy and/or claims that the grade in computer science isn't as easily available as people said, i would say, SCREW YOU! Damn it, just seeing the numbers i really felt that this whole GPA thing is dumb. Computer science people are really enjoying themselves with the grades with a bit of effort and we computer engineers are alway running out of time and most of my friends are like struggling like MaDnEsS to even achieve a decent grade.

I would be very lonely if not for one of my friend being there. I could not find another local student from computer engineering in Nanyang Auditorium that i could talk to. Such a person simply did not exist.

After attending the talk which lasted for around 3 and a half hours with a tea break in between, i was quite tempted to take up the project despite knowing the fact that it would be at the expense of my free time. The DSO SOAR scholarship will be available in year 3 and the criteria is to get a 4.0 GPA at the time of application. For every year sponsored, i would have to dedicate 1 year of my life to DSO in return. From what i heard from my friend, the starting pay that DSO is offering now is $3.5k. Hearing from my other friends how their relatives got $2.6k-$3k for their starting pay as being high, $3.5k is definitely something worth more than a thought or two. But it would also means that i have to be ready for research works and most probably spend all my life researching. Oh well, there is still something less than a year for me to consider the scholarship, and i think by then, i would have come up with a firm decision on what i would like to be after my university life. I am not even sure if i can maintain my academic result for this year with the knowledge of the immense workload compared to last year. Hopefully everything will turn out fine and i could stay being a 4 pointer at least by the end of year 2. After saying that, i really have to start taking my modules seriously, with the realization that what i did in the last academic year would simply not be enough to get me the grades i want this year.

I am going for the 9-5 hall activity now. Hopefully it would be interesting so that i have at least something to write about when i come back. Ciao~! =)