Things I miss about NUS

Sudden thoughts while I am locating transition states for a particular reaction.

Things I'll miss about NUS (listed in no order of priorities):

1. Lectures, tutorials (different flavour as we go from year 1 to 2 to 3 to 4)
2. Chemical Sciences Society (comaradarie, Past Year Papers, Chemiscope, FOD etc.)
3. Friends, especially the discussions with Zhijie etc. (Effective Learning, organic, inorganic)
4. Canteen food (Arts, NUH, Business etc.)
5. Research (UROPS, Honours, friendship with Lao Cai, Fang Zhen, Doreen etc.)
6. Library (Science, Medicine, Arts, Business) --> I recalled those corners when I do tutorials/study for exams in the early years.
7. Route linking Science and Arts, Arts and business etc.
8. Badminton and Tennis Courts
9. The walk to Dover (dining with Lao Cai and friends late at night, during research)
10. NMR lab (the andrenalin rush while doing NMR as it determines whether your previous day of hard work pays off; not to forget, the crapping/scolding from Mdm Han and Peggy)
11. Teaching labs (especially Mdm Irene, Uncle Philip etc. Especially enjoyed myself during TA duty and Chemistry Olympiad training)
12. The crapping sessions with the profs and TAs.
13. etc

The Day I "Conquered" Sai Kung

... & brushes with death.

It's quite an intimidating experience climbing Sharp Peak, the tallest peak in Sai Kung. At the base of the peak, the following signs were displayed:

I started the climb at 1040, reached the peak at 1140 and return to the starting point at 1250. Apparently, the decending part is tougher than expected.

The road up:

The final ascend: The top: The Uncle who started later but finished earlier than me:


Following that, the uncle went off to the other side and I descend. This is when I fell (for the first time in hiking):

It was a painful but worthy experience. I had 2 brushes with death; it's a trilling experience indeed. On my way down, I saw 3 groups of people coming up and they were surprised that I am on my own. Well, sometimes you have to brush with death before you appreciate life more?

That's about it on the hike. The interesting stuff, you have to experience it yourself! No breathtaking scenaries as the sky is filled with mist. What a disappointment!

Felt lonely this weekend again, all of a sudden, despite meeting up with Alice's mom and my aunt in HK for CNY meals.

Moved to a new Apartment!

Went to Student's Housing Office today to request for a change in apartment. They replied me favourably and I started moving my stuff to my new unit in the late afternoon. Thanks Xin Hao for helping me with the shift. The new unit that I am living in looks more like a home and thus I guess I'll be happy there. At least, Asanka is a tidy person and he is willing to clean up the apartment with me.

For those who wanna write to me, my new mailing address is "412D, University Apartment Tower B, HKUST, Clear Water Bay, Kowloon, Hong Kong"

I called my mobile service provider to tell them about the change in address. She argued with me for 10 whole minutes, saying that Clear Water Bay is in New Territory, not Kowloon. I understood perfectly what she said but my point is, the address is given to me by the university and all along, they have been using Kowloon instead of New Territory (I don't understand why). Maybe Kowloon sounds more "city" than New Territory?

GZ-SZ Trip

Returned from my Guangzhou-Shenzhen yesterday. It's suppose to be a Guangzhou-Guilin trip but we couldn't get the train ticket in the end. My apologies to Felix, David, Anthony, Li Ling, Jia Hao & Jin Sheng for the screw up.

The trip is almost perfect, except for the Guilin screw up. As usual, the people like the food (especially the dim sum!) and places that I introduced them and they were glad that they were on this trip for if not, they will have miss out some of the best delicacies on Earth. The group is a good mix of Canadian-born Chinese (Felix, David & Anthony) and Singaporeans (Li Ling, Jia Hao & Jin Sheng) and everyone mixes well with one another. The first night was kinda happening as we had overnight Karaoke (I didn't sing much though). Apparently, those Canadians love to sing (though they don't really understand the meaning of the chinese words). We had a walk along Zhujiang (Pearl River) on the second night; however, we avoided the night market as there were simply too many people. I returned early to the hotel with Felix as he was down with a fever. I guess he was too exhausted prior to the trip.

We took the train back to Shenzhen on Sunday afternoon. The Canadians decided to return to HK for the fireworks; the rest of us Singaporeans except Jin Sheng decides to stay in Shenzhen for shopping. I didn't want to stay initially but as I am the organizer of the trip, I would be worried if I just let the both of them stay behind. Li Ling's room-mate is from China and her aunt brought us to a really nice place to get cheap clothes and stuff. The quality is also better than that in Dong Mun.

It's a nice trip overall and a different flavour with this bunch of people.

I went out to buy roast duck and chicken this afternoon and dine with Asanka in his apartment. This was the first time I had such dining in my 4 weeks in HK. A sense of nostalgia emerged when I recalled having such dining with Emily, Don & Philip. Asanka then told me that one of his apartment mate returned to Sweden as he has completed his studies. Suddenly, I felt like moving into his apartment as he bothers to clean it up and the place looks really tidy. I just can't cleaning toilets and people don't make the effort in maintaining it. I will go to the Student Housing Office to enquire tomorrow. Can't wait to move out.

Anyway, I talked to Mrs. Tam from the Science Dean's office last Wednesday and I was surprised that she actually brought this matter up to Student's Affair's Office. I was told that if I am really unhappy, I can choose to move out now. She also told me that I could apply for the Hall tutor in the upcoming semester so that I can interact more with students and in return, gets to stay for free. This is an excellent option as it will mean saving up HK$2650 per month.

In Memory of Thiam Seong

It came as a shocking news.... though I didn't know him personally, I often see him during my UROPS and Honours year. He's a hardworking PhD student but life's unfair to him as he departed this world before his PhD defence. May he rest in peace and his family members find peace with time.

His last words: Take life easy, but with no regrets. Not neglect those who care, who needs you. 'coz when you are leaving this world like me, you can smile and say "bye".

His good friends in NUS remembrance of him: when you feeling bad about your research, he will appear and say "Take it easy, relax, and you will see what you are missing"

Just returned from Sai Kung Hiking (yes again!) with a couple of exchange students from North America and some postgrads from China. I was the guide and many thanks to Felix for suggesting to the group for giving me a dinner treat that evening.

I was pretty pissed off on Friday, after I returned from my lab at 1am. The bathing area was flooded and the person who bath before this didn't bother to clean up the hairs to clear the drainage. I went to sleep that night without bathing (yucks) and when I want to bath on Sat, it's not clean again! Felt yucky to have such apartment mates; I cleaned up the mess and the result is as follow:

Had a class at CUHK on Sat and it was pretty fun. I took this Polymer module that allows me to attend lectures in HKU, CUHK and UST. It's fun in the way that we get to attend class at different uni. The lecture on that day was pretty boring and dry though :(. The remaining 2 modules I took were pretty boring too - Bioanalytical Chemistry was kinda trashy (though the lecturer is amiable and jovial) and Advanced Organic Chemistry II is totally crab. What he is going to cover in 4 lectures was actually covered in 1 lecture by Martin. Adding to the fuel, there is no exam for this module and he is actually lowering down the standard.

Met up with Tommy on Sat night and had dinner with him. It's really nice catching up with old friends and it made me feel less blue.

Why can't they have the courtesy to clean up the bathing area???

Imagine this: you return back to your hostel at around 1am feeling really tired and you have class on Sat at 10am. All you hope to have is a nice hot bath. When you enter the bathroom, you discover to your horror that the bathing area is flooded, clogged with hair particles AGAIN! How will you feel?

That's what I am feeling now -- PISSED! Why can't the people in my apartment have the courtesy to clean up the bathing area after use? It's so sick lor. Seeing the water flooding over made me feel like puking. I am here to study, not to be you guys' maid! The people living in my apartment suck big time man.

Cyclic Peptide Sucks

Today has been a lousy day. Talked to prof Wu in the morning and apparently, nothing fruitful turns out in the end. Doing conformational analysis on cyclic peptide is driving me crazy; there're simply so much possibilities and how are we going to analyze it? Worst still, he wanna see if these cyclic peptide can form nanotubes. Gosh, how long will the calculation take? He made it sound as if this is much easier than doing mechanistic studies. My foot lor. It's so meaningless sitting at the computer, looking at hundreds of conformations where everything seem the same to me.

My seniors were consouling me yesterday. They also dislike this project as they felt it's too much work and even if we have many results, there is no story line to link these result. In short, no conclusion can be drawn. One of my senior spent 1 year doing similar stuff and ended up with nothing. In the end, he decided to come out with his own project and move on. Apparently, people in my lab likes to suggest their own project. This is good for me as well as there are a lot of reactions that I will like to look into. When they realized what boss wants from my project, they laughed and said this has always been his dream. I paused for a while, memories of Dr. Yao's talk in the ISCOC last year flooded back and I thought, yah, dreams - a strong driving force indeed.

Since this project is more like mission impossible - searching in the dark for a one cent coin, I will do my best to get some results. I guess Chengdu side needs some of these results before they can get a good publication. Hope that this episode of my life will be done with quickly before I get to do things that I really like.

It all started with a "dream", indeed.

First TA duty...

Had my first TA duty today and duration was from 10am till 5pm. Had a bad headache after that. Overall experience was not so satisfying as I didn't quite like what I am doing. In addition, the system here is pretty werid - lab technicians seem to have a lot of power and they are basically guiding the students most of the time. This makes me wonder what the TAs are for. For my side, the lab technician is very nice but I feel that she speaks too much canto to the students and guided them too much. On the whole, I feel that HK students are lucky as all the apparatus were laid out nicely for them (clearly labelled which conical flask is for whick unknown; my gosh!). Students in NUS were generally more independent.

Went to talked to Prof Wu right after my TA duty. He didn't seem to be in good mood and wasn't very please by my suggestion of changing project. His take in the issue is basically: finish up this oligopeptide thingy before you do the reaction project.

Feeling sucky now.

School Stuff

I washed the toilet and the bath area yesterday. I think this is the 4th time I am doing this; basically, if no one wants to do it, somebody has to do it and since I can't stand dirty places, I'll do it. There is such thing as free lunch on Earth, depends on your luck.

Thanks Xin Hao for patiently guiding me in the computational stuff again. I managed to learnt most of the basics today and successfully calculated the conformation barriers of cyclohexane and modelled a simple SN2 reaction:

What you see is the end product of the work. The calculation wise involves some complicated algorithms. The simple SN2 reaction didn't work last week, after nearly 1 day of finding the transition state. The reason being that the basis set is given wrongly. Instead of RHF/6-31+G*, I used RHF/6-31G*. The "+" makes a lot of difference as anion is involved in this reaction and we need to introduce a diffusion function to make the calculation works. For cyclohexane, it's not easy too. I had a hard time finding the boat structure as it always slip to the more stable twist form. What I need to do is to fix the dihedral angle to make sure the conformation is eclipsed.

Kinda stress up today, though I have learnt most of the basics. This is because the initial small project given to me was on optimization of oligopeptide structures, something which I don't like. Being a more hardcore organic synthetic guy, I will prefer reactions related projects. My major project was on reactions but that will have to wait till I finish the peptide stuff. Xin Hao told me that I could talk to Prof. Wu on this matter as he can sense my passion in synthetic stuff. He also worked on some Diels Alder reaction stuff. I could probably continue with his work and stuff related. Anything is fine, so long as it's synthesis related.

Tomorrow will be my first lab TA duty. Hope things will go on well. I don't know why but I am not enthusiastic at all. I recalled being so excited in my first TA duty in NUS that I literally jumped around. I guess the reason is probably because it's MC and not synthetic lab.