Busy bee or copy cat.

It was probably one of the stupidest things I've ever done in my entire life.

An entire semester's work. To be crammed in less than 24 hours time.

If I don't make it, tell my family I love them very much.... is what I would say if I could actually die from all the last minute work.

But no, it's not possible.

Surprisingly I did think of jumping out of my 4th floor room window so that I wouldn't have to deal with the all the work.

But then I wouldn't be able to graduate. That's no fun.

And oh, also, I would die. LoL.

One thing about people that like to work last minute, we have a very high tolerance level of stress.

But I'd be lying if said the stress didn't get to me.

At one point, my roommate and I were awfully quite, without even the slightest whisper (except for the occasional swear words.)

Suddenly, I would break out into a song that suddenly popped into my head. Out loud. So what if its 4 am?

What first started out as a normal song, quickly turned into nonsense and we'd then both laugh out loud. Even if you were there you probably wouldn't get it, so not expecting you to get it now.

But that's how I particularly deal with stress. I sing. I laugh. I make other people laugh. Most of the time the stuff I spout out is pure nonsense, but when you're not exactly mentally stable from lack of sleep and all, anything other than mechanical design of your equipment seems funny.

Oh, I just remembered one guy did drop by, then left in quite a hurry because we weren't exactly talking to him, and not exactly talking to each other, more likely to the walls and to our laptops, so maybe that freaked him out a bit.

But at the very last hour before submission, things got very serious. Very tense. No funny business. Curse words were thrown out. Names of weird-nosed animals were shouted. Ctrl+C and Ctrl+V were the most typed keys on the keyboard by this time.

At one point, I thought to myself, What would happen if my examiner found out I was plagiarizing? Would I have to repeat this semester due to this one bloody subject? But if I calculated everything myself, I won't finish this thing even if they gave me another day, let alone another hour. That doesn't even take into consideration how long it would take to print out an 80 page report.

Crap. Crap. Crap.

What should I do?!

I froze.

That one minute felt like an eternity. That one minute could have been used to type roughly 70 words, according to my average type speed.

No more thinking.

Ctrl+C. Ctrl+V.

What if I failed?

Ctrl+C. Ctrl+V.

What if I am caught plagirizing?

Ctrl+C. Ctrl+V.

What if my parents are informed of my plagirizing?

Where on Earth will I be able to show my face then?

Sure people have been suspended before, extended a few semesters, sooner or later they still graduate, but the shame, the embarassment. Not just to me, but to my family..

I stopped.

Sure, by this time every single Chem Eng student would either be submitting their report or copying the hell out of the ones that are done, but what if out of all those people, I was the one caught?

Paraphrase.

Its not called plagiarizing if you copy only certain parts, and do certain parts on your own.

Best solution considering the options, I hear my brain say to me.

So be it.

4.15 pm. 45 minutes to submission.

Some things I did on my own, calculated properly. But only some. In my defense, my part is definitely flawed. Not enough information was available for me to do it properly to begin with, but with time I could've conjured up a set of data that would seem logical and real.

If only I could conjure up the time.

To hell with all that.

4.20 p.m. 40 minutes before submission.

Done. Not really, so many things could expose me for the cheat I was, but what the hell. If I continued, I wouldn't have enough time to print out the damn report, and what good would that be.

Time to print.

*ping*

Who in the hell would want to die by PM-ing me right now?

"yo. report anta 27 ke?"

" ?  xfaham? "

"Tadi K cal Dr F. Die kata 27. Group aq anta esk "

"betul ke ni. jangan tipu"

without waiting for a reply, I ran to this fella's room.

Yes, the rumours are to be believed. God has intervened and saved most of the final sem Chemical Engineering students from certain academic death that day. I'm pretty sure most of us will remember this cursed yet blessed day until the day we, like really, die.

How unbelievable. It truly felt like a miracle to me at that time. Really, what are the odds of something like this happening? Actually it did happen before, the FYP progress report submission date was postponed, but it was informed early in the morning, not 40 minutes before submission time. And at that time I was fully prepared. My report was already done. So it didn't really affect me that much.

But this, oh my God. I am so so so very relieved and grateful. If I could actually cry from stuff like this, I would have, but I can't, so I just made sobbing sounds. Which sounded weird. LOL.

Now that this stupid thing's been postponed, time to study for my OM test. Couldn't have studied for the test before, had to finish this stupid thing.

But here's the kicker - OM test, today, 6 pm.

LOL.

till next time. peace.

p.s : true event, happened last week. report was successfully submitted on tuesday, final presentation done just a few hours ago. FYDP settled. one subject down, 4 more subjects to complete before I graduate. and for the OM test? I think I did okay... haha. results aren't out yet though. oh well.

a post to remember.

i have a test tomorrow. i've barely studied, yet im blogging. what a smart thing to do.

i've never been a disciplined person. in kindergarten i would often get into fights with other boys. at home i would get into fights with my brother. boys will be boys i suppose.

this did not mean i was a bully though. mostly i was the one being bullied. i really was a good boy back then.

i remembered that i was really talkative at primary school. one of the noisy ones. i remembered that i talked too much that i didn't know what the homework was most of the time, so i had to call my friend to ask.

those days, studies were never a problem. i don't even recall studying for tests. but i was top of the class most of the time. haha. until standard three anyways. then i skipped one year and went to standard five.

by standard six i was grouped into the smartest class apparently. so competition here was much more fierce. i can't remember what number i got in class, but it was in the top 10 still, so not bad. but i was the best speller in class. haha. unfortunately there was no spelling bee at the time, so i couldn't represent the school.

and yes i was still being bullied by some of the bullies. lol. i remembered playing this stupid game where you had to bang the other person's back if he didn't do the safe sign, and i got banged so hard i think it bruised a bit. but i did do the safe sign, this bully just wanted to hit me. zz. i remember my grandmother applying minyak gamat on my back.

[caption id="attachment_125" align="aligncenter" width="267" caption="Standard 6. it was very bright so i had to squint my eyes."][/caption]

i don't really know what this has to do with how disciplined i am, but lets just carry on.  in secondary school i was a bit less of a good boy. haha. i used to get caned a lot, and would often get caught with long hair. but in my defense my hair is thicker than most people and although it looks long, it isn't. regardless, i would still get caught, up to the point that the discipline teacher recognized me coz i was caught all the time.

didn't perform so well academically in secondary school. i remembered getting number 20+ in class, close to 30 i think. and my mother wasn't too happy about it. haha. and she still isn't. haha. oh well, some things never change. but i was still in the top class though.

i really liked history. cause of the stories i think. really hated geography. i would often say " why would i wanna know what people in this unknown country mined? ". i think this was the point were i picked up on sarcasm. haha. there was one time i had to do a hundred sit-ups cause i did badly in a geography test. that sucked.

come pmr time however, i pulled my act together. before the pmr, i was number 8 in class, tied with one chinese boy. for pmr, i was one of the three people in my school that got 8a's. (most of them took only 7 subjects. lol) apparently coz of this i was quite popular. but i didn't know. lol.

[caption id="attachment_126" align="aligncenter" width="604" caption="Form one. see if you can spot me."][/caption]

when most of my friends fled to more prestigious schools, i decided to flee as well. however, not at all intrigued by the concept of "taking care of myself at boarding school", i went to a school near to my house. a newly opened school. a place where the older schools nearby dumped their bad students. i must say that this was a very bad decision academically, but i was young. how would i know.

here, i was no longer bullied. i was more or less the bad boy now, though i never did any bullying. my studies weren't so great here, probably cause of the lack of competition. plus i was preoccupied with all the girls. lol. been in an all-boys school, relatively speaking, this was the first time i interacted with girls. i remember my father saying to me on the first day of school, "my son is now a teenager". lol.

due to all these factors, my spm results weren't so hot. i couldn't apply for any scholarships. i couldn't go to this swanky looking university i visited in tronoh. my teacher actually said this on result day. "yasin ni saya rasa kalau pergi sekolah lain mesti boleh dapat result lagi bagus, tapi dah duduk sekolah ni, apa nak buat".

till this day i often wonder what would happen if i would have gone to a proper school. i often imagine myself having a flawless academic record (cause spm was the only one that spoiled it all), and i probably would have been able to go study abroad with all expenses paid for by scholarship.

but honestly, i don't think it would have made that much of a difference. nowadays that school produces so many scorers, so it isn't really the school, its me. plus i don't regret the choice. i may not have excelled academically there, but the school did teach me a lot about life. about people. i really believe i grew a lot as a person there.

luckily, after spm, i was selected to enter pasum. though i was very low-profile there, i made some very close friends there, and enjoyed the hell out of life. haha. surprisingly enough, despite all the non-stop hedonistic activities, my results were not bad.

it was also here that i was forced to speak in english. since some of the malays here speak better english than malay, and some even better english than english people. lol. but through it my confidence to SPEAK (speaking and writing are two very different things) in english improved, so a very good thing indeed.

[caption id="attachment_128" align="aligncenter" width="300" caption="my class at pasum. i wonder who that girl is. LOL."][/caption]

due to my not-so-bad results and my improved english, thanks to my one year stint at pasum, i was able to get accepted into my current university. and so here i am. still the undisciplined bum, blogging hours before an important test. haha.

all in all, utp has been a very good place for me. i am more patient, more understanding, less rude, less painful to live with, more open to people. i also learned a thing or two about engineering. LOL.

[caption id="attachment_129" align="aligncenter" width="225" caption="a 3-years younger me."][/caption]

i'm not really sure what this post is supposed to be about, i think i did one like this before, but i do have one concluding point. life is unpredictable. the best way to live is to live without regrets. if i had gone to a boarding school, i probably would still be the wimp that was being bullied all over.if i had scored great results in my spm, i probably would not have gone to pasum, and would not have met all the people that i did there, and that in itself would have been a great loss to me. i probably would not have ended up in UTP, which apparently is the envy of a lot of universities out there, even the ones overseas.

(a friend studying in australia preferred my uni's curriculum better. plus i saw a university of melbourne graduate at our career fair, so that says a lot about our uni's exposure to the industry.)

okay that is all. back to studying. or maybe sleeping. lol.

take care. peace.

p.s : don't bother commenting. its bugged. wrote an email to friendster asking how to remove the verification thing, they say its standard so not an option to remove it. may move this blog to somewhere else if i have the time.