NTU and...NTU

That is all my mind is thinking about. About what I did today in NTU. For the benefit of people who do not know what NTU means, it stands for Nanyang Technological University. Which is one of the top 3 university in Singapore. And where Singaporean students plan to go. That is, aside from the Ivy league in America (Cambridge, MIT, Oxford, Harvard), where they just and probably will remain a pipe dream.

What we did today was to have a university lecture for (quoting from the program description) "high ability learners with a passion for Science and Engineering". And the email sent to congratulate me for being accepted into "a premium enrichment programme". Basically, the whole program is just based on us learning some university level stuffs. It was brain-draining. It was mentally exhausting. It made me sleep on the train for an hour and made me almost missed my stop (or I would have if my stop wasnt the very last station).

I gotta say, it was exciting. No questions about that. It was academically challenging and it made me interested in stuffs that I once thought was out of my league. There is something different about learning when your lecturer has the same expression on his face as you, of joy in the wonders of mathematics. Boy, can you feel the passion emitting from them.

They love the subject and they know you know it.

I would love to talk about what I learn today, but it would be long and I would need to explain everything in further details. And if I start, I cant stop.

Touching on the cooler stuffs. Their toilet.

That's right. Their toilet. I didnt take a photo of the interior of the toilet cubicle (duh) but after I was done with my...erm...business. I notice a knob that says "Push here". So imagine me sitting on the seat pressing this button I know nothing about.

What happen was a nozzle came out and shot water up my....you-know-what. I preactically jumped up. The shock I experienced.

Anyway, it DID serve its purpose, which I am not going to go into detail (awkward chuckle). But my point was the toilet in NTU was really clean and high-tech. Which will definitely affect my judgement if the day comes where I have to make a choice between my degrees and which university I want to go to. Heh.

The campus was huge. I needed a bus from one point to another.

And the canteen food was amazingly cheap. I know, all these stuffs seems mundane. But hey, it was my first time strolling in the campus that might well be where I find myself 2 years from now.

That is, if I make it to a university. I might flunk the national examinations. *Shudder* There is always that chance. The horrors. And the ice-cold fear. I hope not. I am quite a pessimistic person when it comes to my future.

Small competition of my school versus another (Ming Liang's round)

Another highlight of today's program was the Game Theory tournament between all the schools there. The brains of the various schools pitted against one another in an all-out competition of "Brussel Sprouts". Have a go at it with another friend. You might find there is more to the game than meet the eye.

Our school's team, comprising of my friend, Ming Liang and I clinched first. It was really awesome. That is, both the part where we won and the competition as a whole. :D

The bag containing Ming Liang's share. A 50-50 split

And we got a whole bag of science puzzles as a prize. And we decided to donate one of the puzzles to our school's Mathematics Society because...well...just because.

My share of the prize

The puzzles look really lonely and small. But this is the puzzles without its boxes, without its wrappings. In all their glory. The green rod at the back is not a puzzle- it is a rubber pencil. A really long one.

Then the professor took out another bag of prize, saying that he will pass the whole bag to us if we win him in the game.

=.=

That's us versus a person holding a doctorate in Discrete Mathematics. I would love to say we won but it was really a one-sided fight. I hope we gave him a good run for his money. And another lecturer held up two movie tickets for the first person who solved the question on why is integer point and convex pentagon always having a perpetual area of 2.5, also requiring the prove for counting the area of a primitive triangle of 0.5 using boundary points and local contribution to explain.

That just sounded confusing so I wont go ahead with the details. No one won those tickets.

For those readers who go, hey, this blogger is an idiot- those tickets could have been mine, here is some mathematical questions. Problems that if you solve, you get a million bucks.

Take a look. I assure you, this is really interesting stuffs.

I have more photographs actually, but I think my memory card is a little corrupted. That pretty much sucks for a blogger.

Alright. Gotta sleep earlier today since I have to get up bright and early for tomorrow NTU programme.