Why NUS is making everyone so pissed and just ruining our holidays…

To those people who study in foreign universities and feel that life is so great and simple, good for you that you don’t have to put yourself through the pain and agony that Singaporean bureaucracy has set upon us… So here’s how everything began…

Back in mid October, NUS decided to implement this thing called e-Learning week, where students should not be in class, but conduct self-study using materials by the lecturers online. The reason for e-Learning week was that they wanted students to isolate themselves away from the H1N1 threat and get better… So what actually happened. Students had an extra week of holidays, lecturers had to re-order their lectures to ensure students don’t get too lost, students continued to go out and party and get even more sick… On top of that, NUS issued out another advice stating that students should access their materials during the normal lecture times to reduce the load on the servers; not that bad, except that no one actually logged in during the normal times. Even better still, most of the material had to be accessed on-campus or via NUS-VPN. NUS-VPN kept getting congested and going to campus kind of eliminated the purpose for e-Learning and self-quarantine…

Sometime in the first week of December, NUS announces that they will be porting over all the student accounts to some new University environment called myISIS (my, Integrated Student Information System). By doing so, it somewhat provides a centralised location for students to access all their personal information, from tuition fees to exam results. On top of it, they sugarcoat the announcement with butt loads of good points and good reasons for doing so, trying to hide the fact that the servers would be down for a week and that the exchange server will be highly inaccessible. However, upon logging in, this is what you see…

myISIS home screen

I assure you, there’s nothing else on the home screen… So much for the hype. What they advertised is still there, but this is what awaits you when you log in, a boring little search box… Not even categories or other shortcuts to any useful information.

Then comes December 22, the release of examination results! So what happened this time was that students had to log in to the exams directory and fetch their results. However, students who are attempting to access their results off-campus had to log in via NUS-VPN, sounds simple enough, but the servers were full! Everyone I knew, including myself decided to just wait the extra hour and SMS in for our results. By doing so, we still had to wait about half-an-hour before we actually got our results!

Now, it’s time for the most stressful period of any NUS student’s life, aside from exams, MODULE BIDDING… This is what happened at the scheduled time that CORS would be open. Server is down and we can’t log in! When we actually managed to connect about 3 hours later, all our info is messed up, by my own calculations, I have obtained a total of 144 MCs allowing me to file for graduation, instead it was reflected that I had only obtained 132, though it allowed me to file for graduation, it set me into a state of panic as I wasn’t sure how many more modules I was required to take! I figured that they hadn’t updated the modules that I had taken last semester… The same story mentioned among my friends and lo-and-behold, I seem to have only accumulated 98 MCs!!! Good job CORS! You never fail to surprise me!

On another note, I will say this and not to anyone in particular, since I have had to deal with multiple parties before… Studying in NUS is NOT FUN and though many NUS students are seen having fun, when it comes to studying, we have to work our asses off just to earn our honours! For those coming from foreign universities, ask yourselves this, why did you even go there… There can only be so many reasons that point back to the fact that Singaporean Universities are not as easy.

Let me help you with some options:

- Did not do as well for A-levels/Diploma

- Wanted a more relaxed study environment

- You got an overseas scholarship

- You wanted to experience other cultures (and why would you actually want to experience other cultures?)

- You want to get a degree from a more prestigious University

- You just want to study modules/subjects that are only relevant to your course of study

I’m trying to be nice… Seriously, when your friends from local universities bitch about how stressful Student life is, please just try to be understanding and don’t say such things like “studying is fun”, especially if your reason for not studying locally is the first two…