Block B: New Cocu Subjects In The Works

Ms Hellina of UTP Co-curriculum Unit has helped us address rumours of new additions to the subject options, with several special interest subjects being proposed to management.

UTP Sports & Co-curriculum Appreciation Night

Society of Petroleum Engineers UTP took home the major honour of Best Club after a year of successfully executed events, both at national and international level.

Mindsets Matter; Sexism in Our System

Columnist Ashley Ng's take on sexism in engineering universities and what we've got to do to address it.

UTP Tennis Close 2013

Defending champion Amirul Arrif reclaims his gold medal, overcoming Muhd Helmi in the final.

Sitting Down With A Mercedes F1 intern!

David Bong shares his experience interning for Mercedes AMG Petronas F1 in the UK.

Internship Myth Busters!

UTP has long been renowned for its lengthy internship periods, but there are some really dangerous misconceptions floating about, often confusing even its own students! So it's time to separate the fact from fiction when it comes to internship placements!

Goodbye Academia: Convocation 2013

1147 graduates receive their scrolls, marking an end to their time at UTP.

The Bhangra Revolution - Gajjdi Jawani's Rise to Prominenc

Columnist Afthab Afrathim tells the story of our beloved Bhangra performers, who've come very far since their humble beginnings years ago.

Elections, SRC, & Rakan Masjid : Persepective at Last?

Campus Elections of 2013 will always be remembered as the one that didn't happen. Heart of Tronoh speaks to the people that matter, in an attempt to investigate the waning interest in campus politics, and shed light on the main players of the drama surrounding the infamous no-go elections of Jan '13.

Monday, 14 September 2015

Making Different Friends: Putting Timidity Aside By Dario Jose Manuel Garrine ( Petroleum Engineering, 2nd Year/2nd Semester)

Making Different Friends: Putting Timidity Aside
By  Dario Jose Manuel Garrine ( Petroleum Engineering, 2nd Year/2nd Semester)

I recall talking to a good friend of mine few weeks ago about social life in UTP and suddenly hearing him saying: “whenever I find somebody whom I don’t know and that person greets me, I know immediately that he is a newcomer”. Sadly I had to agree with that statement to some degree. It seems that the first days in UTP are the most social for most of the students. As time passes, UTPians tend to give up on making new friends and start giving in to timidity. We decide to get attached only to that small group of friends from our own country, state, home-town or even race. All the aspiration of having many friends from different background and learning many things through those friendships is then quenched by the idea that we are safe when we have friends from similar background as us. However, we fail to realize that embracing that philosophy might be the closing of a gate that could lead us to a better perception of life and other things. Furthermore, having friends from different background can teach us how to deal with differences, help us getting more interpersonal skills and influence us to dream higher.

It’s no news that interpersonal skills play an important role in our lives and carriers, but did we know friendship can be the key to good interpersonal skills? I mean the right type of friendship. The type of friendship that places a challenge before us forcing us to learn how to hear and evaluate new ideas, how to organize our ideas and speak clearly in a way that everyone understands, how to reject and have our own ideas rejected and even how to lead, as in those situations where we give our friends some ideas and they look back at us and say “okay, you show us”. Yet we see many people taking online courses to acquire skills that can easily be learned without much effort in their daily lives, by making different friends.

Friends from different backgrounds inevitably learn to deal with differences. They learn to quickly recognize boundaries and respect them. Hence, by the time our university years come to an end we already know a bit of many kinds of people and are aware of their sensitive areas. For example if we have a very feminist friend in university, when we meet another outside the campus we will recognize them more quickly and know immediately how we should and should not address certain issues.  In this sense, having friends very different from us makes us wiser in dealing with others similar to them.


Another great advantage of having friends from different backgrounds is that they can influence us to dream higher. That can happen through conversations in which you get to know about different opportunities that only those friends know about. It can be a job opportunity that offers a salary that you never thought of, or it can just be a simple business idea that you think you could have good chances to implement. Moreover, it’s important to bear in mind that your university friend today will be professional worker tomorrow and their collaboration can be very important to you in the future. “Life is box full of surprises”.



Why then do we choose to give in to timidity and close ourselves from making new different friends and even influence newcomers into the same path? Isn’t it because of fear and emotional laziness? Fear because all that is new and different to us raises the question of whether it will work or not and when we realize the only way to know it is by trying we then give up because we are afraid to fail. And emotional laziness because we know building friendship with people from different background from ours inevitably brings us many challenges due to our cultural differences and we are lazy to deal with all those emotion that might come along with the challenges. Nevertheless, overcoming this fear and emotional laziness can render us many advantages.

Life has a lot to teach us and the best way it does so is by others. It is time for UTPians to realize that socializing more and having more friends who are different from them (either in ethnic group, state or country) is the best for them and even safest, considering the era of globalization in which we live today. So, why should we not put timidity aside and allow ourselves to have exciting experiences? Why not making new and different friends and getting the best from our university years?



Painful Pleasure

Painful Pleasure

Humans are fragile and tend to crack when we faced difficulties at times. It’s in our nature that we choose a path that strays away from pain. But pain isn't necessarily bad at all times. Pain is just a feeling that we, humans experience, both emotionally and physically. Truth be told, pain and pleasure have a very close relationship. If you want to taste the sweet nectar from the bees' hive, you must endure the sting from an army of bees. Pain will lead you to pleasure if you are willing to work for it, change for the betterment and get up each time you fall.

To master pain, sometimes you need to apply the art of 'i-don’t-care'. How do you think those Shaolin monks are able to withstand all those inhumane pressure on their body? They channel all the pain from the source to the 'i-don’t-care'-care' area. Genuine grandmasters call this phenomenon as finding your inner peace or master your senses. It's possible to apply it and you will gain a temporary time of trance. The art of 'i-don’t-care' is basically ignoring your dilemmas and have time for yourself. So, you can do whatever you like, to get out of pain and let time or luck to solve the problems for you because ignorance is bliss. It can be useful at times and save one's life. Imagine you are on the edge of a building's top platform. You had just being dumped by your loved ones or you had a really rough day. Before you take another step to hell, use the art of 'i-don't-care'. Say to yourself, “I don't care about her anymore. I got a four legged bitch to worry about. I don't need a two legged bitch." All the shoulds, coulds or woulds will not matter anymore. Salvage what you can and move on with your life.

To cope with pain, sometimes you need to surrender yourself to it. The journey is rough and you will face ups and downs but the ending will be worthy. This defensive mechanism has been going around for ages. Mammoths have thick fur to survive in the cold, chameleons change their skin's color to the surrounding. Adapt yourself is always great when you are stuck in a foreign situation. You can't change the game but you can change how you play it. If you have being stung by bees a thousand times, what could a stung or two do to you? That's how adaption works. You trained yourself harshly or learn from experience to tread softly in the future. As your plate mail grows stronger and harder, you will only feel a tickle when an arrow hit you in the chest. Adaption isn't easy and it takes some time. Patience will get you there.



Some people pray when they are in deep trouble asking for mercy or some miracles to happen. Some take pills to ease their mind. Others might eat down their troubles to their stomach or smoke some pipe. There are thousands of ways to get pain out of your system. Unethical, unorthodox ways will make you a freak to society. Hence, control your addiction and keep reminding yourself that you are stronger than you look. Break some rules but not the law and have fun for once in your miserable day. Those people who seem joyful even though they are actually poor and sad, they are the real MVP. It’s all about the little stuff which everyone likes. How often do you get a free meal because a waitress messes up your order? How often do you get to skip classes, not knowing that there are actually no classes going on that day? Call it God’s work, fate, destiny or luck, I called it a sign. A triangle will bring up the Pyramid of Giza or the Illuminating, as for me, the first thing I will think of is the Pythagoras Theorem because that’s how deep I am into engineering.
 
I trust in the signs that keep on happening to me. Failure to being accepted into an organization or clubs isn’t that bad for me since I do not know those clubs will actually need me to work my ass off. Forgetting to bring my wallet which save me from food poisoning. The Internet being down which signals me to study for finals, so I can focus on my revision without much distraction. These are some signs which I believe in.

Everything that’s happening around you is all for a reason. Look it up and if you believe in it or the cause of it, pain will always be a pleasure to you.


Make the Change

Make the Change

Learning and curiosity has been the pulse of all humans that push us to understand our surroundings. However the meaning of education has been warped the past few decades.

There is no denying that many of us, have an agenda about education that we may even call it a ‘personal conflict’. We all thoroughly understand that we have to ace grades to be on top and at the end secure a job for our future. But somehow many of us do feel that in the end, going through the learning process does ware us mentally, whether it’s during high school or college.

The constant pressure of keeping up with assignments and quizzes and test, just pushes most of us to just make it, and many students even at a very young age just desperately want to leave school once they get into it.

We all suffocate our self into memorising facts that will be tested for exams only and ignore the rest that of the information. Familiar with the words ‘What‘s coming out for exam teacher‘? In this process many students fall sick and for serious cases have mental breakdown, and later forget what they had learned the very second after writing the exam.

What had happened? Why the torture and torment?

First, let’s start off with how did this particular educating system popped up. How and why did everyone consider that lots of technical teaching and test will determine if you were smart? Well according to TED talk winner of 2013, he mentioned that the current educating system came about during the reign of the last greatest empires on earth , the British empire. The empire need to run smoothly, as it was a huge empire. The most effective way was to pass information and data were through ships. He puts this in an interesting way by saying that this giant system was like a machine that was made up of humans, called the bureaucratic administrative machine. Now the machine, as we all know will wear out , so to have its ‘parts ‘ fixed. The “part” that was to fit in this machine had to be exactly identical with the one before. Hence schools were created to create many identical copies of people, so that this system will continue to run smoothly and instantly functional, even if the new recruit came from far ends of the world .The empire is now gone , but we still choose to hold on to such obsolete way of learning.

This way of learning deprives students of the actual joy and thrill of learning. But when we do ask ourselves, ‘Well is there any other way of learning?’

We can’t think of any. However Education researcher , Sugata Mitra made an astounding research about the way we see education. His famous experiment called Hole in the Wall, is where he places a computer in a very rural village where none had ever seen a computer, and then leaves the children with the computer for several months. He found that this children figured out many things about the system and structure of the computer and even its internet wonders.

He has gone far and deep in his research, by going further in placing a computer in another part of India in a rural village and filling the computer with information of only the DNA replication in English. A language they did not understand. After coming back to the village in several months, the kids managed to figure out the processes of DNA all by themselves in a different language and were far ahead of their time. This is because genuine curiosity and verbal communication with all learning partners.

We can’t drastically change our education system, but it has been pretty clear that more cohesive involvement in learning should be practiced, rather than an ugly fight to race and be on top. Many students in Malaysia are used to memory based education and are not used to more hands on activity. Hands on activity are simulating, but we need to do them right. In UTP, having a lab for my Chemistry and Physics subjects were amazing. I personally liked holding the flasks and filling them with chemicals and usually fight to be the one filling up the flasks.


But all we do is actually, take orders from the instructors and be forced to finish the lab before the time is up and write a report on something we genuinely cannot understand. Then at the end of lab, you can ask all students of what they learnt, many can’t say much and will just briefly describe that they did in lab. It is pretty much a waste as students finish their lab work to make sure the marks are secured and nothing more.

I would really love to suggest that if it will be possible that one day, the lab instructors leave us with the necessary precautions and just guide us in our experiment finding, not to be desperate to fill up any tables or charts but to slowly understand the process and be allowed to go even further and adventurous if time permits. Students will actually have time to enjoy the playing out of their curiosity with the experiments they conduct with a much deeper understanding.

Other than the constant race to be on top, we also have strongly held to a flaw that kills the genius of all the young minds. The fear of losing and failing. It grips us all. We are all very familiar with the embarrassment of not getting good grades in class and have yourself being judged by other students and nosy parents. We have all heard Thomas Edison said” I haven’t failed. I just found ten thousand ways that won’t work’. We all get inspired by it for a moment.

But when reality hits, there is no time to take your own understanding and interest in the system, you have to catch up and force yourself to the top. We have all heard the devastating stories about young kids who commit suicide because they feel humiliated with their results which causes mental breakdown. We then have counsellors telling us that you have a lifetime to prove yourself and not to waste it by committing suicide is hilarious. These kids have their life intertwined in the system that just teaches them how to score a test and to figure out life by themselves. And the best advices from counsellors can say is to just ignore them?


In the end, we all must come to terms in creating a healthier environment for the development of true genius and creativity .We cannot continue a system that mostly causes stress and humiliation to all young learners .We need more researchers in the education department that will guide our nation to a better structure of education and not be afraid to take these steps.

I genuinely hope that this article could have ignited some spark to students to understand the true meaning of education, and to conduct their own research in the education system that we have and be bold to take a different paths of learning and embracing curiosity in their own terms for themselves or their future generation.


I leave a small challenge to all learners at heart that, you actually take some of your time to learn something that you have always wanted to learn and understand, because if you do, your natural tendency to figure things out will kick in and this time no matter how many times you fail, you and with all your natural animal instincts know that you will pursue and succeed.