Budak Kampung

I am grateful to be called up for another scholarship interview last Thursday. This time it's Yayasan Sime Darby. I was emailed and told to come by the Sime Darby Business School in Kiara for the interview on June 2nd. They told me that I have already passed the first stage of the selection and I need to go through the second and the third stage of the selection.

Second stage being the impromptu speech and the third stage being the online assessment. For the impromptu speech, we will be drawn random topics and we are given ten minutes for our presentation. And only then, they'll shortlist us whether we're qualified to go to the third stage or not. The third stage consists of two types of test; numerical analysis and verbal analysis.

Aku dok bertagak jugak, nak pi ka tak pi. Motivation takdak langsung. Aku dok asyik pikiaq, pi all the way to KL, cuma untuk cakap 10 minit. And kalau tak lepas second stage, rasa cam wasted ja. But mama made it clear that she don't mind, that I need to go there and just enjoy myself. So the plan was to go there for a couple of days and and go watch Adam play for Penang in Sukma over there. But something came up and in the end I had to go there alone.

Let's save and skip the stories of the hardship I've been through just to get to the place. Big deal, tempat orang, mana kita nak tau jalan tui dak? There I get to meet all the overly smart student who pwned examination just for fun. Ada yang lepasan matrix, ada lepasan stpm, you hardly find a diploma holder. Ada jugak yang tengah undergone their first year of degree. Pointer takyah tanya la. Semua otai. Met this guy from Uniten with a CGPA of 4.00. Engineering student with 4.00 cgpa? masa tu rasa diri kerdil gila.

Ada 5 batch yang kena panggil untuk second stage. Setiap batch ada 30 orang. So roughly, you have 150 candidates fighting for 22 spots in the program. YSD have an extremely (i quote) rigorous selection process. During the second stage, I drew the topic "Health is the most important thing in life. Share your opinion". I dont know what I did, but I stand there struggling to NOT look like an idiot. I mean, that was actually my initial plan. But my assessor was so cool, in time I gained confidence and my speech got better and better. Alhamdulillah.

And yeah, I managed to get into the next stage as well. Alhamdulillah. From my batch, out of 30 people, only 9 people managed to get into the third stage. 2 orang ja melayu. And then all hell broke loose. The online assessment was a pain in the ass. They give questionnaires that we need to answer in a very short amount of times. 4 soalan dalam masa 3 minit. Lepas 3 minit abes jawab ka tak abes jawab ka, the web browser akan refresh pergi soalan seterusnya. The questions are difficult and you need to use your analytical skill to answer them. In short, they're trying to separate the genius from the non genius.

Kak Martha, the coordinator told us that they'll let us know in one week if we were to go to the final stage. Yes, ada lagi satu stage. The final stage. Sometime next month. So sometime tomorrow or the day after, they'll inform us. I'm not expecting much. I did badly in the online assessment. But to come all this way and rub shoulders with some of the country's best and finest students, is already an honour to me. To me it's already a heck of an achievement. Coming from an unknown college, against students from highly decorated ipts, well im really proud to be an ICT student. :-) till then.

Bad Luck

Been experiencing a run of bad luck this week. Earlier this week, I was ticketed by the police. Why? Sebab melawan arus jalan. Bloody hell. It was 4 am in the morning. I was at seberang jaya, just going back home from futsal. Being a mainlander, how am i suppose to know which road yang one way and which road yang tak one way? Bloody police takdak courtesy langsung.

Earlier that day, we were robbed of a futsal game by some lowlifes who thinks that they can just come to the futsal centre and play against us. It was plain simple. Kami tak set game dgn depa, tapi depa perasan kami set game dengan depa. Miscommunication at its best. Bila mai seberang jaya all the way from the island, and tgk kami main dengan team lain, mula tak elok nak mintak duit minyak tol segala. Nabil got into troubles, but credits to Nizam and co, the lads whom we were playing against that night for being such a gentleman in handling the matter. In the end, we teamed up with nizam's team playing against those lowlifes.

The next day on Sunday, I played in a futsal tournament at Seri Delima. We lose in the second round and to our dismay, we really had that game in our hand. We had countless of chances but we didn't find the goals that we needed. Talking about bad luck, huh? Ada 10 chances tapi, 1 pun tak masuk. *sigh. Then on Monday, abah asked me to opened up a company bank account. Abah set up a company to do some business but since abah is a government servant he cant register the company under his name. That's how I came along, using my name as the company director serving as his proxy.

Tapi bila nak bukak akaun, chip IC aku lak tak boleh pakai. So tak bleh go through the thumb print process and in the end, kena postpone. But since it's urgent because abah needed it asap, then we had no choice but to remove me out from the company. But there could be a silver lining in this all. With me applying for scholarships etc., having my name as a company director could hinder my chances of getting one. Especially government-based scholarhip like JPA.

There are others that happened as well, but as the post got longer, the moodier i got. Dah rasa cam tak best dah nak cita lagi. Spoil mood betui. Urgh. Hopefully this series of bad luck will end latest by Friday. Because come Friday, both results for USM intake and YSD scholarship final stage candidates list are out. Man, dont think I could handle two bad news in one day. Harap2 la suma ok. Amin. Amin. Amin.