15 years after graduation, I still get the occasional nightmare about turning up for exams without having studied a single thing.
Do you ever get those kinds of recurring dreams?
I don't think I could, or want to, go through those exam years again.
So why did I put myself through the Dip in Translation Skills with SCCIOB 3 years ago?
That was a bit of madness.
The fun sort.
My Dip classmates and I had an agreement.
We wanted to do the Dip by the intensive route.
We had a choice of intensive or leisure and like most waste-no-time Singaporeans, we committed ourselves to two modules a term instead of one, so that we could finish in 9 months instead of 18.
Each lesson was 3 hours long, and each module took 3 months to complete. You can imagine the number of hours a week we spent at Hill St after work.
It was a crazy schedule, and nearly all of us were working full-time then.
But we pulled it off and graduated with another useful qualification to add to our CVs.
Funny how I started out in life being neutral towards Mandarin and just mugging for the sake of assignments and exams.
Then as I grew older, I started seeing that it was a beautiful thing to be able to speak Mandarin fluently (which I don't, by the way - just ask my Dip classmates), to read the Bible in Mandarin, to sing hymns in Mandarin.
Have you tried reading a Bible verse in English, then reading the same verse in Chinese?
It's an amazing experience.
Is it just Mandarin, or is it the way a whole new world opens up to you when you are able to communicate in another language?
Now I'm hitting the books again.
I chose to do a Dip in Publishing because I want to know what really goes on after an author submits a manuscript to his agent or publisher.
Who's involved?
How does it get to the final state when it's printed and bound and put on bookshelves in Collins and Angus & Robertson?
And secretly of course: how can I get there? ;-)
So here we are again, swotting and doing assignments.
Hopefully, I've learnt from my years of being a not-very-exam-smart student.
My first assignment came back with a... 'D'.
Horrors!
Did I misread the instructions?
Surely not. I had read and re-read them and checked my answers quite carefully before sending them off to QLD.
I looked desperately at the interpretation key at the very bottom of the cover sheet.
The one that explains what your grades really mean.
D = Distinction *beam*
One module down, 13 to go.
It's nice to know my brains have not completely deserted me after 3 years away from full-time work.
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