SOW

Just ended my Science Orientation Week(SOW) yesterday. I'm going to start school tomorrow and it hasn't sunk in yet. How I wish next week is still orientation week. SOW was fun and I was glad that I had joined. If I hadn't joined, I wouldn't have known so many wonderful freshmen and seniors. There isn't any opportunity to make friends in lecture theatres and I see many people going to lectures alone. University life can be lonely. It's just so much harder to make friends. Anyway, I will attempt to write a summary of my SOW experience. I was assigned to Sylvester, along with Ho Teck. We hadn't arranged to be together and as with case in Scamp, I was stuck with a guy that I knew for a long time. The first few days of SOW weren't much fun. There were a lot of disruptions with bidding for modules and people leaving halfway for personal reasons. Also, the SOW group isn't as enthusiastic as my Scamp group. Which isn't neccesarily a bad thing, since I'm not enthusiastic myself. But it certainly made the atmosphere a little dull. We slept quite a lot during the first few days and the AOGL, Peiying wasn't too happy about it. She expected us to be more enthusiastic and was disappointed when we slept. But we more than made up for that by winning the war games played on Saturday despite having less resources. We broke off after the games and regrouped on Monday. We attended the FIC on Monday with us wearing formal. It was awkward wearing formal after days of wearing casually and people said that I looked like an insurance agent. We had our OG outing at Fish and co but only 7 freshies went. Many left halfway and I myself felt a little disappointed. Only 2 girls went for the outing. The dinner was a touching experience for me because the OG celebrated my birthday for me. I hadn't expected them to remember my birthday and was surprised when I saw the birthday cake. It was great even though my birthday was actually the day after that which was Flag Day. After dinner, we went to PS to buy SP presents. It was the first time where I felt the few of us started to bond. The next day was Flag Day and it was also my birthday. It sounds sad but I didn't feel that way. It was a unique way to celebrate a birthday and I knew I was doing something meaningful. During Flag day, the seniors were really nice to us. They bought drinks and food for us and encouraged us along the way. The SOW seniors were really good to us during the camp. I had expected Alvin and Peiying to push us quite hard but they turned out to be very nice people. The rest of the seniors were very nice as well. Makes me feel a little inspired to be a senior next year even though I can't see myself being enthusiastic 24/7. We broke off for National day and went back on the 10th. We went to Sentosa for games and as was the case with Scamp, it was very fun. We won most of the games and had a lot of fun along the way. The most fun part of it was throwing seniors into the sea at the end of the games. The Sentosa games really bonded the OG together. At night, we helped out with rag reluctantly. Nevertheless, we had fun encouraging Johnson who was hardly motivated at all. The next day, we walked around school like zombies for the amazing race. After that, we had rehearsals for our performance before performing at night. I thought our group performance was pretty good. It had a flow to it unlike some of the others. However, our performance didn't win any prizes. After the performance, the rag director asked for 30 volunteers to help out in rag. Almost all our OG guys volunteered even though we hadn't slept much the night before and we knew we weren't going to sleep at all by volunteering for this job. It was tough moving the float around without much rest and there were a couple of times where I knocked out while pushing the float. And as usual, we tried to have a good time by making jokes. The five of us, Keng Soon, Khee Nguen, Lewis, Ho Teck and me called ourselves the dome boys as we were pushing the dome. And led by our leader, Li Da, we successfully completed our mission. It was tiring but I felt I had at least contributed something to Science rag. Though we eventually lost to Bizad, I still felt a sense of satisfaction as I knew we all had given our best. SOW ended with rag day and as was with Scamp, I felt a tinge of sadness as we broke up and prepared to enter the monotonous routine of lectures and tutorials.