This author is currently on hiatus for the ignoble cause of mugging. The public is advised to remain calm, as this routine protocol has been shown to have no effect on one's violent tendencies in 96% of cases.
| Friday, July 13, 2007 |
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gah, i can't believe i haven't blogged for the last 5 days - school is getting ever so mundane. Adelaide exchange has come and gone; birthdays have come and gone; and soccer tourney matches have been postponed (cos the other side didn't turn up. =.=) a lot of sports competitions are coming though, gym+judo+track ftw! hope we can get another half-day off this year xD just wanna share something leefy told us the other day after bio practs... for you guys under external mentorship schemes (esp. to local universities) such as SMP and HSSRP, surely you must have wondered why those professors would ever have agreed to mentor your groups. they already have such busy schedules, so why should they bother spending extra time to oversee a project done by a bunch of (lowly) secondary school students? the official reason msotly given is that the profs share similar fields of interests with their mentees, and would like to further their interests through such projects - but if they were really that committed, why don't they just conduct research by themselves, rather than spending so much extra time to guide amateurs through it? another reason would be that these "prestigious" programmes wish to groom young talents (which is indeed one of the major motivations behind CAP, i believe.) however, there is no guarantee that these "talents" would ever contribute back to that area once the project is done with; scholarships and attachment schemes would be a much wiser choice in this sense. after all the praising of the mentors, we would probably think that they are oh-so-compassionate, caring about society around them and all that. however, the truth is that they are forced to do it. Not specifically mentorship programmes per se, but apparently they do have this CIP system too. And mentorship schemes do happen to add to those hours. in other words, those smart professors would much rather simply mentor some students than to go down to East Coast Beach and spend an entire day picking up litter there. it's something like how we'd rather teach math to primary school kids to meet the CIP requirements. of course, this is not the discount the few professors who do willingly take part in mentorship schemes because they truly believe it is for a good cause. however, after getting this little piece of info from leefy, im pretty much convinced the case is often otherwise. this would probably explain why my mentor has been pretty slack and not chasing me after my work either. which is of course both a good and bad thing. =/ |
'Twas teh winnar at 11:22 pm.
