shoot first

Technology’s been a bitch towards me for the past 48 hours or so. YouTube refuses to load videos for me, Microsoft Word is frustrating me with auto-formatting that doesn’t work, my spare mouse broke down, Google Wave is a pathetic collaborative platform blah blah blah.

So I’m here, taking a break from my project report which is due on Thursday. Just finished putting whatever everyone else has done into a single document (I’m telling you it’s NOT EASY) and I have to come up with a content page, an executive summary, a conclusion AND I have to edit the whole thing (grammatical and spelling errors etc.) by tomorrow morning.

I need to kill something.

Anyway, if you’re one of the (very) few who follow me on Twitter, you would have noticed me saying something along the lines of wanting to change course. I didn’t reply anyone because I was seriously thinking very, very hard about it for like 3 weeks and didn’t want to announce anything prematurely.

Here’s the thing, I feel incredibly depressed every time I think about school. I feel depressed not because I’m stuck studying something that I hate, but because it’s something that I have absolutely no interest in and no passion for. I find myself unable to care about my school work, barring the electives that I actually chose to take. And the thought of having to build a career out of this scares me unlike anything else.

This semester I chose to take this module called Introduction to Narrative, and the module project was literally to do anything that demonstrated the concepts of narrative. My group decided that we should film a short film since I already had experience in editing footage. (If you haven’t checked it out yet, click here.) During filming one of my group mates said to me, “Seriously, what are you doing in Real Estate? You should change course.” I didn’t really think about it until I got home that night, but once I started it gripped me and refused to let go.

So yeah, for 3 weeks I wrestled with the idea of applying to ADM at NTU to take up Digital Filmmaking. I already had some sort of portfolio that I could submit (a short film that I shot in JC – link here, a half-hour video I did for Hawk Company and the teaser trailer for the SDE Bash – link here), I could easily write the short essay required for application, and I could probably have scraped through the drawing section since it isn’t really relevant to filmmaking.

I know it’s a bit of a stretch for me to apply for something that I have so little experience in, but it’s something that I have a very strong interest in, and I’ve got a knack for being creative when it comes to things like this. I really, really believe that I would be able to do very well there.

I called my mum and proposed the idea to her – she wasn’t very keen on it. I checked on how the tuition grant would be affected since I’ve already spent a year in NUS – I would have to pay full fees during my final year, no subsidy whatsoever. I didn’t even want to think about the Student Loan, because I would either have to pay back whatever I had taken from the bank already and then take another loan, or they would let me ride on the current loan and then I would be almost $50,000 in debt when I graduate. And if I went to NTU I’d have to stay in hall, which would be an added burden on my parents.

And so, the application window came and went, and I didn’t apply. So yeah, looks like I’m stuck writing reports on investment trusts and management principles.