Goodbye Year 1, Hello Year 2

Published on 2024-08-14

This week is the last of my first academic year (for my masters program), and my new career as an instructor.

Looking back it's exciting and rewarding year. I completed 2 out of 6 courses required for the masters program. And supported 3 different courses as an instructor.

Sitting in a class felt (for the lack of better word) "weird" at the beginning, on both sides. It's 8+ years since I last sat in a class as a student and first time being an instructor. During the first term I supported one course and took one course for the masters.

Second term was merely a continuation of the first, with slightly higher work load. Work load was higher because I was supporting 2 subjects, compared to 1 in first. And was learning a subject (information security) I'm not familiar with.

After the second term came the third which is the summer term/break. Since my school doesn't offer any courses during the summer term I didn't have to actively support a course nor learn. Given these two activities occupied the majority of my time during first two terms, I ended up with a lot of free time on my hand. During this time I mainly did prepare for the course I'm about to support, and read about the course I planned to learn.

During summer term/break, I also played a bit of racket sports (mainly table tennis due to my recovering tennis elbow), traveled home, walked across Singapore, took a train to the boarder of Thailand via Malaysia, and took lots of photos.

And from what I have seen so far, I expect the coming year to be more or less a repetition of the last.