February 27, 2020

CAS Final interview

byebye cas! I’ll miss you!

January 16, 2020

Play reflection [LO2/LO5]

I have always been interested in theatre, but this is the first production I have been a part of. I couldn’t be prouder to witness the way the cast works together. I have learned a lot about the working process, and the relationship between the script and the production has taught me a lot about script-writing and staging. The play has helped me appreciate the amount of work that goes into every moment on stage.

A challenge that was undertaken is that I was previously unaware of how much work goes into a production and I had trouble balancing the play with my other commitments. Even though I had only a few lines, the play being an ensemble-based one means that I was constantly moving on the stage and need to remember what’s going on at every moment, not just those of my own. Although we had many rehearsals, I was at the end not entirely satisfied with my performance because there are many places I could improve. As an actor, you need to control everything about your body, from your walk, your behavior, to facial expressions, to every single intonation – and as a novice theatre student I am not quite there yet. But I am glad that I took up the challenge of learning something new in G12, and now I know that I will definitely be doing more theatre productions in college.

The play also taught me more about collaboration. In the play, we relied on each other for encouragement, cues and a better performance, and every single person’s input matters a lot on the stage. I realize that collaboration means more than finishing your part of the work but it also is the process of empathy and encouragement in viewing the feelings of other people as your own.

October 13, 2019

MUN Reflection

Today, I conclude my 7-year MUN career. My last conference was filled with laughter, surprise and contentment, and inevitably underwhelming moments of anticlimaxes. As much as I would like to embrace the grandiose personal narrative we have crafted, I must admit that it, too, falls prey to the Lacanian symbolic–real–imaginary triad. Nevertheless, it is worthy of celebration and reflection, the exact phrasings of which I must capture now before they take secondary importance in my memories.

I distinctly remember my first conference. I was the Delegate of Vietnam, transported miserably through my province’s characteristic rain to another city, my very first overnight school trip ever. We stayed at Novotel. It was a proleptic trip: I tried Indian food for the first time in my life, and a senior Japanese girl who adored younger students made sure to ask me about any and all details of my experience. I did not know then that I would go to both India and Vietnam as parts of my high school diploma, and I certainly did not expect the (almost motherly) love I now feel for our younger delegates. In any case, these peripheral details were enjoyable. I must admit that I felt somewhat intellectual for the first time in my life.

But I began my MUN career as nervous as any first-time delegate. There was, however, one fatal caveat. I spoke broken English: I was an ESL student on my second year in an international school. I made no speeches at my first conference, despite three months of training as one of the two only Grade 6 students in MUN club, where I was always under the impression that the word “delegate” was a mispronunciation of the adjective “delicate.” I should take no credit here for my involvement in the club: my mom signed me up, for whatever reason she had in mind. I knew nothing about United Nations since I grew up with a fatalist penchant for current events, and therefore considered diplomacy none of my business. But MUN was really interesting, filled with so many cool high schoolers, so I stayed. I have never considered dropping out.

I grew into it, and I picked up better English along the way. I was so focused about writing clauses as my written English was better than my spoken English. I didn’t speak much in committee, but I was a diligent co-submitter. For mysterious reasons, my clause-writing skills earned me the reputation of “being good at MUN” amidst my grade-level peers. That was daunting. I was truly an impostor. I couldn’t even make a proper speech.

This all changed during my third conference. I began speaking, and I began speaking a lot, furiously, to prove myself to be good. Since you think I am, so I must become. Why did this happen? Well, I was placed in the same committee as a classmate who was a native speaker of English. Somehow I wanted to be on par with them. It wasn’t competitive in any sense: I didn’t want to be better, I just wanted to be as good. I carried this hope into my relationship with the English language.

My classmate hyped me up back home at MUN club. I began chairing my first conference at Grade 8. I have all of them to thank.

MUN at Singapore, and especially MUN at UWCSEA, was definitely up multiple antes from my old school. The eloquence, dedication, and demand for quick reflexes was unlike anything I have seen before, but I was prepared to be better. I’m glad that I now have a means to express my curiosity for the weird way our world is structured. I was fortunate to look towards the next experience as delegate or chair. It was a certainty: there would always be a next time at MUN, always a future motion and a resolution/research report to write. New committee, new speeches, new grievances and questions. MUN was a reminder that there was always a next date to improve yourself. MUN here took me to Philippines and Thailand, and I learned to be impartial, flexible, and ultimately someone who deeply believed the involvement of oneself in global matters of all levels of gravity. So when I decided that I wanted to do more things to do with maths, etc in Grade 10, I kept MUN as a reminder that discovering more dimensions of myself does not mean I had to abandon who I was before. Similarly, I thought this when closing my last conference.