The end of Sem 5 (3rd Year Sem 1) Slowly and steadily into internship - 4th year Sem 1 (Sem 7) and working life upon finishing degree...

This blog post is basically what I could sum up from this semester (3^rd year semester 1 aka Sem 5) of university life.

Hi everyone, recently, as you may have come across with news related to the trend of Covid-19 in Malaysia, you will be dismayed. It was fluctuated in between 3000 to 57++, as compared to last year’s (2020) early September’s few hundred cases daily record. The highest record, so far and hopefully the last peak, was at 5728 cases on 30^th of January 2021 and since then, the number of cases is declining steadily. This has proven by the statistics given by our Health Ministry Director General - Dr Noor Hisham, that our country’s infection rate has been reduced from above 1.00 to now 0.91*. Since the infection rate has been in downtrend, then I believe some of the university students especially those who are in Science and Engineering field eager to go back to campus in order to conduct their lab experiment. Recently, our Higher Education Ministry had released a notice to all university students regarding to go back to campus or not to. Anyhow, it only let few selected fields students to backto campus, namely whom they are in Science, Engineering field as I mentionedabove and Postgrad students starting by 1st of March 2021. Therefore, my university life for the next semester will remain the same as current situation. Speaking of university life, without further ado, I will talk more about my life in 3^rd year Sem 1 in the next paragraph.

After going through 2 semesters of online classes, I felt like I am getting used to it, gradually… I am not sure that feeling, but it certainly has the feeling literally like working as “freelancer”. Online classes absolutely making us, the students’ life comparatively hectic as to pre-covid-19 usual physical classes. As you can see, we couldn’t meet each other in this pandemic crisis, and instead everything was done online. Even discussion of group assignment with teammates are also online – through social media such as WhatsApp. That is the part many students are afraid to confront. Imagine that you as a team member and the group keep blasting messages of task distribution for group assignments or someone in your team sometimes asks questions to you. That’s the part if you as a team member, what if you are the team leader. You as a team leader sometimes need to plan a feasible tasks distribution and strategies in order to complete the group assignment the lectures had given to groups. The worse part is when a team member hasn’t even replied your message at all or being idle in a group without or barely contributing to the group assignment. Headache, this is just the tip of the iceberg in the online class method. You may think that individual assignment is good due to no more people bothering you or asking you this and that in assignment, but it’s not actually. Sometimes, some lecture may have zero apathy towards students too, sorry to say that, they will likely either give students tons of individual assignment on weekly basis (luckily not mine lecturers for this semester) and some will give reasonable weigh of assignment but giving it out to late in time (one of my subjects in this semester did like this but it was in group assignment). Handling out late, so late till almost final few weeks, tasks to students will only make them to have a great burden in facing upcoming examinations. In short, time management is rather important skill for us, university students in order to survive in universities, regardless in online or physical classes. This is because once we had practiced a good time management, then we will a productive “freelancer” who able to “handle” many jobs given as possible. This may be useful later in society, perhaps.

Random picture of morning walk. Morning walk is the best way, for me, to alleviate stress from the academics.

Apart from that, as far as I concerned, online classes enable us, university students to be more flexible in adapting to the changes. There are many changes in our life that we may not even get to predict and think of. For example, there is a change in online class time from originally shown in the academic schedule to a random different time slot. The changes like the previous example that I had cited will trigger many voices of opinion for a “suitable” (some may suitable and some may not think so) time slot for that subject’s online class. As for this semester, I have one subject that the lecturer whom he is teaching in two universities in a time (my university, UKM and another public institution), usually facing the time dilemma in handling both classes. Therefore, he asked us the best time to conduct classes. Guess what, lastly majority are agreed with Friday evening class even though, for me personally, Friday seems like no “mood” to attend for class. I still accept the majority’s choice since we can gradually adapt to the changes and be flexible with it. Besides, I will cite here as well on the other lecturer who is quite innovative in lecturing. That lecturer did know himself did not have enough time to conduct classes on weekly basis and he had made a series of lecture video on YouTube few months before (to teach the earlier/previous semester students and by recycling it). YouTube is a good platform for some of the students who aren’t into synchronous way of lecturing and those who are lack of internet access. The reason I include those who are lack of internet access is because YouTube offered a way to save a video offline first while we are still have connection to internet. Since YouTube lecture videos is asynchronous to host the lecture, therefore it may make the learning interaction a bit harder. For example, you may find it hard to interact with lecturer and it is limited through email address only. Although the lecturer had made tons of lecturer videos in advanced but still, he had also made it along with a series of learning path for us to carry on self-assessment by ourselves for the respective chapters. Little side note here also, that lecturer (who make YouTube lecture videos) also gave us the 5 continuous assessments (replacement for final exam) with time limit of 24 hours from 0000hrs-2359hrs, in which we entitled to have an absolute freedom of making any changes or time management in doing those assessments. There are still more examples related to be flexible or to suit with abrupt changes in this semester that had just ended but I didn’t mention here because the rest are more or less are similar with generic semesters. In short, we should adapt and be flexible to the new environment or new aspect in life as usually those who successfully adapt to the new situation are the winner.

On top of that, after undergoing two online classes semester, I perceived that open book is the way more challenging method of examination. Albeit of this examination method is so appealing, but it comes with its price too. This is owing to open book method allows students to refer as many resources as they can during the tests, and hence, the difficulty will be elevated too at the same time. You may think that open book exam is a good time to directly copy all the things available in the resource, but in fact it is the opposite. Sometimes, the questions in the exams are so challenging that require more cognitive and analytical skills to answer. So, in order to be well prepared, we as the university students are require doing revision over and over again, so that we could be able to grasp more the gist of the knowledge of the subject and the technical parts of those chapters. Since most of the online exams of this semester were in essay mode, so it can be absolutely hard to copy words from the sources that you had prepared for. Little did we know, there is a wonderful invention online called as plagiarism checker. It can check the similarity of our works with the source we look for, such as through online sources, textbooks and even course mate’s works. Thus, be careful in copying and paraphrasing the works and the better enhancement of our work is through “goreng” method along with some reference to add on, if the exam is essay mode. Meanwhile, for calculations or mathematical questions, you got to stand on your own feet to accomplish it. Henceforth, it can be said that open book examination or other mode of online examination are challenging, but if preparation were done earlier, it maybe will be fine.

Here are few sentences about wrapping up all the point of views I had given on paragraphs above. This is roughly what the online classes look like, except it is fully in online method as compared to previous semester where we had our physical classes for 3-4 weeks before our beloved country – Malaysia landed into Movement Control Order (MCO) in middle of March 2020. MCO may restrict our movement but it will not restrict our academic lessons from going on (P/S: if deferred again from conducting classes, everyone guaranteed to be affected, such as late graduation *touch wood*). I am glad that with these 2 semesters of online classes which I have good teammates in doing group assignments together. Indeed, with the good teammates, your work can be easily done on time as well, along with high quality of written assignments. I used to be so selfish in sharing knowledge or sources related to that specific subjects to others but ever since I am getting more senior in the university life, I had gradually becoming more willing to share my some of my direct seniors notes to others without many hesitations. Well, time flies, two more semester (4^th year Semester 1) I will be going for an internship before resuming studies in 4^th year Semester 2(the last semester of university life). I know I had been typing in so lengthy for this blog post, I got to stop here already, if not it will totally be like as long winded as thesis project.

Good luck to everyone in future studies and undertakings.