SECONDARY SCHOOL
As for my Secondary School, I got enrolled to Bedok South Secondary School, after many recommendations from personal tutors and my teachers in Primary School. During my Secondary School life though, this was when I developed the values that stay with me today, and when I really gained my love for learning new things.
For me, Secondary School started off quite well, as I did quite well for my first year, scoring mostly As and Bs for most subjects. It was however, quite a drastic change for me from going from studying 4 subjects to having to cope with 7 subjects at a time. My free time became less and less, and I had to focus more and more on my studies to make sure that I do not fall behind the rest of the class.
I was quite antisocial in my first 2 years, but I really became more social and more extroverted in my final 2 years, and that was when I really gained friends who I hope will stay as my friends for the rest of my life. I also gained a few new mentors in the form of my Mathematics teacher, Mr Samuel Goh, who is a really funny yet cringy guy who really cares for his students and is willing to help them out in any way that he can, and Mr Kelvin Yong, who is a tutor of mine who went out of his way to really help me grasp the concepts of questions that I do not understand, and is willing to drop me life advice whenever he can. Right now, even when I have doubts in my work, he is willing to take some time out of his busy schedule to teach me. Truly, shoutouts to you 2.
My first 2 years of Secondary School is what I consider my ‘slack’ years, when I basically studied very little and spent a lot of time on games. During that time, games were very appealing to me as it was a great way to kill boredom, or take a break after studying a bit. I also did not talk very much as I did not feel the need for friends in Secondary School, as I only thought that they would only drag me down and make me less productive in my work. But boy, I was wrong.
In year 3 and year 4, I made a few very good friends, namely Wei Lin and Jeffrey. This is the small group of friends that I often studied with, talked about our pleasures with, and are the group of people who introduced me into one of my favourite guilty pleasures – anime watching. Anime might seem like a joke to some people, but for me, anime has really inculcated some of the values that sticks with me today, such as ‘Hard and smart work translates to success’ and ‘teamwork makes the dream work’.
But back to the point I am making about these friends – they are honestly some of the most valuable people that I have met. They really changed my attitude for the better, starting by changing my study attitude and giving me a love for learning. They somehow make everything seem a bit simpler, such as mathematics equations, where they can find loopholes to help me understand a certain concept much better.
Whenever we study together, it always seems as though I am learning something new, although we might be only revising an old topic that has already been went through in class.
In the 6 months leading to the O Level examinations, I was working my ass off learning new concepts from my friends and my tutor, and studied in my own time to make sure that I do not forget these concepts and that they stay in my head. I was also spending my time doing practice papers to implement the concepts that I had learnt and this was a very helpful yet dirty tactic that helped me to improve my concepts over the rather short period of time.
With our O Level results on the line, me and my friends braced ourselves for what could possibly be the most difficult exam that we ever took. We talked to each other on Whatsapp, agreeing that no matter the final result, we would be proud of ourselves as we knew that we had tried our best in the examinations.
On the days of the examinations, we were all surprised by how difficult the O Level examination was. Although we mostly knew how to do most of the questions that were in the tests, we still had trouble finishing the papers in the time frame that was given for the test papers. When the suggested answers for the test papers came out, I was quite happy to find out that I had supposedly done quite well in the O Level examinations.
The holidays after the O Level examinations was quite a long one. Me and my friends mostly spent our time playing League of Legends and Counter-Strike: Global Offensive, and even went to AFA that year, which is an anime-based convention that unites anime fans in Singapore.
Fastforwarding to the day of O Level results release, the screen showed that I got 5As in my O Level, which was a signal to me that I had done well in my O Levels! I went up on stage with my parents, whose eyes were beaming with pride. My friends also did very well for their O Levels, and while we signalled thumbs up to them while they walked up on stage to receive a recognition certificate, knowing that we had tried our very best and the results had shown. ‘Hard and smart work translates to success’, a value that I had put on my mind during the examinations, really shown itself here, proving that hard and smart work really translates to success.
After receiving our O Level results, me and my friends took some time to celebrate the return of our results, and we went to indulge in an expensive dinner at a famous restaurant in Singapore, Burnt Ends, which we had originally planned as a goodbye dinner, but turned into a celebration dinner. This meal is one that I will certainly remember for a lifetime, as the food was not only fantastic, but I was also able to enjoy the fantastic food with the best of friends, which only made the experience so much better.
Months down the road, we would all go our separate ways – I went to Singapore Polytechnic’s Diploma in Infocomm Security, Wei Lin went to Temasek Junior College, while Jeffrey went to Singapore Poly’s Diploma in Financial Informatics. We might not be seeing each other everyday now, but we still try to meet each other when it is possible, and we will forever remember the times when we were very good friends.
