Nice - Blogger remembers that I prefer to "Edit HTML", and sticks me into the correct mode automatically!
I'm happy. There's way too many loose strands hanging around - grad school, friendships, life decisions, medical tests, work, love, life, Spanish, et, et, et cetera. But I suppose having too much is much better than having too little.
I would still desperately prefer working in Singapore for a while. Partially, I'm just not ready for the ego-pummelling of applying all over only to be told that they only consider Honours students, or that my publication record is inadequately sparkling, or whatever. Not to mention that while I can still find tons of stuff interesting (evolution, for instance; did I really get through college and only study it in two modules?), I can't really see myself doing anything with it afterwards. I mean, can I really see myself going into full-fledged academia? If not, what would be the point of studying a bit more about evolution? It's an awful lot of money, and with my grades, that sort of money will end up mostly coming from my folks. I can't help but think it'd be a much better of that money to sit and collect interest, wait a bit while I can really give things a try and see what works out for me.
One of my biggest plus points in this dept. is that fact that, despite screwing up my way through college, I somehow managed to find myself with almost exactly the kind of job I'd thought I'd wanted to do when I was a kid - I'm entirely in charge of all programming, design, everything to do with this program other than features, and I take part in designing the some of the features as well. This is huge for me - in most of the industry, you are a part of a much larger team working on something truely gigantinormous, like Blogger or Google or Microsoft Word. I work completely alone - all the blame, all the laurels, mine all mine. It's also the kind of job that changes every day: one day I'll be figuring out why some low-level part of the program is working so slowly and how I can make it faster; on the next, I'll be figuring out which user interface metaphor might best represent a certain set of data, while on the third, I'll be getting feedback from users - real, live users - of my programs and trying to figure out how I can make it better for them. So it's a whole lot of fun because the area in which I work is so broad, because my end-users aren't some abstraction far, far away, but actual friends of mine who work in the next room, and because the work I do isn't your typical castle-on-a-cloud of programming, but good ol' fashioned how-to-make-a-machine-do-your-work-for-you. Which is always fun.
On the other hand, I suppose (sigh) that my folks and friends are right. I will want to go to graduate school eventually, if just for the experience. When it happens, I'd love it to be on my own money, or atleast on some kind of loan or scholarship or something, just so that if I crash and burn - again - atleast I won't feel guilty about wasting my parent's money while I'm at it. And what that means is that I've got to keep an eye on what kind of things I need to build up on - publications, like this one :), references, that sort of thing.
So: the big question is, 2008, 2009, or 2010? I'd love to wait until 2009 - my bond will be up, I'd have accumulated a little money for myself, and I'll have worked for three years, in different jobs, so I'll have a better idea of what I might want to do. And I'll actually have another reference - I've only really got one at this point of time, so. I can rustle up a couple of others, but I'd like a couple of really solid I've-worked-with-this-guy-and-he's-the-goods type references. And besides, there's a lot I still need to figure out in Singapore, with my health, my lifestyle, heck - just life.
So what's my position at present? I don't have one. The last few days I've been in a hey-yeah-maybe-I-will-apply state of mind, but after seeing what grad schools need (note how prominently "2nd upper honours will be fine, but err, yeah, 2nd lower also can" figures. And me without honours at all!), and then I hit the work again, and re-realised just how fun that was, too. And I really, really like living in Singapore - which I highlight to point out that if, say, MoE refuses to defer my bond, I will work off the options first. Sorry. I really do want to live here for a while, eventually, or whatever.
Or whatever. Really. The world is going to stay largely the same out there, however hard I try or struggle or whatever. Let's see how it goes. It's still extremely worrisome or whatever. I wish my parents would just get off my back about this for the next three years or whatever. I'll figure this out, yes, okay, fine, alright. Thanks for the advice, really, but please, before I explode, just back off. It's not so much to ask for.
Labels: future, gradschool, happy
This post was posted by Unknown at 2:05 am
