First week in school

can only be described using: busy, tiring, hectic and troubled.

Busy is because i let myself go for 8 courses when we only had to take 4 courses. i merely wanted to go for as many course as i could attend, to get a feel of those courses. to see what are the courses i like and could understand. therefore everyday was hectic for me, running from lecture to lecture. and thus this leads to me getting tired at the end of the day, everyday. somehow reminds me of the saying, ‘人，利害就好；不要假利害。’ Schoooooool. what else do you expect?

as of right now, i am taking Bachelor of Science, and i have chose to major in Genetics and Microbiology. so after going for so many different courses, what i'll be taking this semester are the following: DNA & Protein Technology, Human Molecular Genetics & Disease, Microbial Biotechnology and lastly, Microbes & Human Health.

for those who do not understand the system, let me try to briefly explain. each year there are 16 credits(#=credits, for short) to complete. thus each sem you have to do 8#. each course is 2#, so in a sem you have to do 4 courses. to grad with BSc, you have to take 6 science courses of which all must be year 3 courses, and you can take another 2 courses which can be of any kind that interests you(eg. french, psychology, architecture...) at any year. and to major in a certain field, out of the 6 courses, 4 have to be from the major that you want to go into. so being the 怕输新加坡人, most singaporean students will take double major. because all you need to do is to take science year 3 courses for all 8 course, and you're paying the same amount of tuition fee so might as well get the best out of it. and as we all know, double major degree looks better.

and so, here comes my trouble. i am at the crossroads of choosing to take single major or double major. to be; or not to be? man... and i thought choosing to eat a single whopper or double whopper is difficult enough.

the reason there's this problem is because, i know having a double degree looks good for my future career. but then i was thinking, for once in our life we have a chance to come to a university to study, shouldn't we follow hearts and also study other courses that interests us althought it may not prove to be useful to what we are going to work in the future?

then i also weighed the pros and cons of single and double majors.

single major pros: more time to focus on work as workload is lesser. and when there's more time we can have more focus and you can concentrate on a paticular field, thus increasing the chances of getting good grades and results. you get to do other courses that are interesting or pursue your other interests, enjoy uni studies. less stressed.
single major cons: look less impressive as compared to double major when looking for a job. the other courses of interests may look useless to employer although good results obtained in single major. in terms of life science, it's not gonna help at all if i have courses that are not related like french, aboriginal and torres strait islander studies or food science and so on. what's worst is i'm a one year degree.

double major pros: as mentioned earlier, look better or more prestigious than other job seekers with single major. might have higher chance of securing a job as all courses studied are related to job.
double major cons: more workload. meaning less time distributed for each work. tight assignment and report deadline, not to mention mid-sem exams and 4 end of sem exam to study for. all these might lead to lousier grades. and so, what's the point of a double major when your grades suck in the end. especially when you stress yourself and have toiled for so hard.

these are all i can come up with now, but the problem is not to identify the pros and cons. it's about how i should go about making a proper and sound decision as to what i should do? i know that there are people who have done double majors, and so this can be done. however, that doesn't mean i have to be like everybody else.

my sensible friends who have taken time to read and understand this, i thank you all very much. but i hope to hear some advice from any one of you. do email me and voice me your opinions. thanks.