He's Blog

Reaping The Rewards Of Hard Work

// December 25th, 2011 // Life, School, Thoughts

I was checking my Mail today and I was surprised to receive an email from my Lecturer commending me for my good grade for his module, CS2103/T – Software Engineering.

In it, he wrote:

Dear Zi Shyun

Congratulations on getting in the the [A+..A-] band in last semester’s CS2103/T. A good grade such as this proves that you are good in both theory and practice side of Software Engineering. I’m impressed.

I hope you did equally well in other subjects and will turn out to be one of our top students over time. See you around next year!

Happy 2012!

-damith

This email marks the first time I’ve ever received an email of appraisal from a lecturer in NUS and damn, it actually has a pretty nice and heartwarming feeling to it.

Something about what Mr. Damith said on the last bit, I’m not exactly sure if I will end up as one of the top students because that kinda seems a little out of my reach. As a matter of fact, I do not aim to be part of the top students. I just want to be an above-average student and try to enjoy my university life.

Back to the email, although I doubt the content of the e-mail will vary from student to student, I sincerely thank Mr. Damith for taking the effort to individualize the emails instead of mass sending to the students that did well. Well maybe he wrote the program to do so but it doesn’t matter, it’s the thought of sincerity that ultimately counts. I’m not sure if lecturers realize this, but e-mails like this really helps to jolt and motivate students, especially the disadvantaged ones, like myself.

You may wonder why I call myself a disadvantaged student. To clarify, that is because I have no prior knowledge to any sort of programming before pursuing a Computer Science degree in NUS. I studied Arts, more specifically Filmmaking, in polytechnic and that means I receive neither the same kind of analytical and mathematical training the JC students or foreign students underwent nor the related computing knowledge that Computing poly students get. But thankfully, I did work hard in high school and that made catching up a littler easier, but does not in anyway reduce the difficulty level.

As a recipient of this email, I’m feel really happy deep down inside seeing that a lecturer has recognized my hard work. More importantly, it made me realize that all the long and painful hours that I have invested in this semester have paid off really well with good grades. And what makes me happy is knowing that it is actually possible for a disadvantaged student to do well by working really hard and such affirmation motivates me to continue working hard next semester.

Speaking of which brings us to a famous quote by Albert Einstein

“Genius is 1% talent and 99% percent hard work…”

Now if you do the math, it’s true that a non talented person who gives his best will always lose to a talented person who similarly gives his best. But understand that not every talented person will give his best, much less even reach 100%. Even if they do, you’ll only lose them by that mere 1%. And honestly? 99% is still a very nice number to sit at, well, at least for me. ;)