Time-Tested Beauty Tips
For attractive lips,
speak words of kindness.
For lovely eyes,
seek out the good in people.
For a slim figure,
share your food with the hungry.
For beautiful hair,
let a child run his fingers through it once a day.
For poise,
walk with the knowledge you'll never walk alone ...

People, even more than things,
have to be restored, renewed, revived, reclaimed
and redeemed and redeemed and redeemed.
Never throw out anybody.
Remember, if you ever need a helping hand,
you'll find one at the end of your arm.
As you grow older you will discover that you have two hands.
One for helping yourself, the other for helping others.

- Sam Levenson

I felt smarter in RJ by virtue of the basal level of general genius around me. Medical school, however, is a morass where politics matters more than intellectual or academic pedigree, where tutors assigned are more content to let trainees flounder daily since accountability for student performance is zilch, and where the reward for graduation is years upon years of the stuff you are supposed to have graduated to from.

It seems I've disrupted from the military school of the OCS, only to be enrolled in this military school of the mind. Is this what vocational school feels like?

There's a student revolution underway, to increase tutor accountability, to reduce the number of days wasted in a clinic where random chance allocates you a tutor fain to silence, broken only by a request for you to run down to the Radiology department to retrieve reports.

There is a student revolution underway, but I fear it is too feeble, and too late.


Motivation level for today : Just do well enough to get by. Not surprisingly, same as in OCS.

Now this is crazy

This is an overachiever. Only a senior (younger than me, still!), and has already published tons of papers in reputed journals. And while doing 672 credits (= 56 classes) within 3 years. Not to mention the tons of achievements (Putnam, etc.) and many ECAs.

And he's not unique. There are several other extremely outstanding people over in MIT of similar caliber and achievements.

This is why I feel humbled in the presence of these people. When people tell me I'm "overachieving", or I'm a "genius", its only a relative comparison. When I look at CV's like that, I do realize my inferiority in more ways than one, even within the academic arena.

Many of my Singaporean peers probably have not seen brilliance of that like before. It's scarily amazing when you see such people doing their work. When you work with smart people, you tend to become smarter as well. The experience and opportunity to work with these kind of people cannot be found in many universities, in particular Singaporean ones.