So not my day

and thus.. by the 17th hour of 28th day of the 2nd month of the 7th year of the millenia, I conclude that today is a 'not so good day' for the following reasons :-

1) It rained.
2) I was refused entry to the engineering lab for wearing sandals.
3) Discovered the perils of having lab teaching assistants who speaks with a heavy accent and lacks fluency when conversing in English.

Rainy days are cool and an enjoyable contrast to the hot scorching weather near the equator. However, such enjoyment comes with a condition that one's self is safely out of the rain with access to a warm and cosy bed contributing to a multiplier effect. Unfortunately, tis' not so today. I was rushing around campus in the 'hustle-bustly' pace we call Singapore, getting my clothes wet and my toes cold. A trusty umbrella can only provide THIS much protection from the rain.

Credit has to given to my terrible sense of judgement for being refused entry into the engineering lab. Not wanting to get my shoes wet, I chose instead to wear a pair of sandals to lab, despite knowing that I may get into trouble if the lab assistants are trying to be difficult. Unfortunately for me, they are. Since no amount of pleading and begging would help, I had to go all the way back to fetch my shoes and join the lab session 30 minutes late. AND, would you believe it, out of my anger at the assistant for being so difficult, I actually left my umbrella inside the lab before I went to collect my shoes, which meant a fully-drenched and extremely miserable Tan Jo. Tis' a bad emotion, anger is*nods nods*.

Ahh.. and now, for the knockout punch of the day :-

Lab Teaching Assistant(TA) : (accented English) When u pick... resistors... don't pick... same resistor... with friend... not all resistors(five were required in our experiment for that day) can be.. the same... at most one is same as "RL"(name of a resistor)... like both u choose.. hundred.. the rest have to.. different, or you will get redundant answer... and u get confused with other resistor....

So what is he actually talking about? That we are not doing pair work this time and we should not share our data? Or is he saying that we should pick 3 resistors with values that are different from the one labelled "RL" or both?

*Confused and thinking it's wise to seek clarification*

Tan Jo : So are you saying that each one of us should get one set of lab equipment for ourselves instead of say... doing together?

Lab TA : (with accent) No... two of you can... share computer outside to plot.. graph later.



ahhh.. so here is where the problem arose.

What he meant was, " No, you guys cannot do this experiment together, but you can share a computer with one other to plot your graphs in the later part of the experiment."

But I'm pretty sure that, judging from the number of people doing pair work, most of us thought that he meant, " No, you don't each get a set of equipment to do the experiment by yourself. Later when you guys are done, you and your partner might want to go over to the PCs in the lab to plot your graphs."

So 3 hours later the TA was frowning and shaking his head at Varjeet and I for having the same data for our experiment(we were the unlucky enough pair to get nabbed T.T), saying that he will have to deduct our marks since "copying" other people's data is an offense in NUS. What the hell! This incident, and the fact that it happened despite an effort to clarify my doubts left me feeling so helpless and indignant. Just for the record, the lab TA involved was of People's Republic of China origin, although I am not about to point fingers at staff of any nationality in particular.

Although it is true that communication problems will always exist between people from different cultures despite using the same lingua franca, this experience has just proved that even if an effort is made to seek clarification on the matter, it may not solve the misunderstanding at all.

My suggestion? Write them down. Write all of those important instructions down in black and white. Especially if you know that you may have some problems communicating with your students. A parallel to the working world would be how safety guidelines in power plants and factories are in print instead of just being verbally put across, like this one over here.


Now, although being deducted of marks hardly counts as a safety risk, but I shudder to think what perils a simple mis-communication would cause in our later years of studies when we are exposed to more dangerous substances and machinery. I'm sure nobody would like to see NUS go "boom" one day because of some silly mis-communication between professor and undergraduate/graduate. So I suggest that NUS should start this good practice of writing instructions down across all levels on campus. Provide each lab a whiteboard and more marker pens(or even give each lab TA, professor a cute mini-whiteboard to hang around their necks if you'll have it xD) or it could be just as easy as encouraging the staff to write out their instructions. A simple gesture to show everyone that NUS lives up to a truly a globalised University that build bridges across cultures; and at the same time, I'm sure we undergrads wouldn't mind not losing marks unnecessarily in the future. ;)