Life goes on, it gets so heavy.

I am still spending my vacation with some internship. I have more works to do now, even though it is not as regular as what I expected. I managed to read so many (random) Wikipedia articles, and it is really fun indeed. I wouldn't say that I got knowledge from those articles, but having any additional information is always good (except for things that we classify as 'too much information', e.g : how many times does *insertanynamehere* go to toilet for a day and so on). And the best thing is that today is 25 June! Well, you know some company prefer this date over the beginning of the month.

Enough with that, I shall tell you the main story now. What is the morale value that I get from internship? Now I understand that every single person tried their best to stay alive. Probably not everyone, but I think generally human being will do anything to stay alive. I am not talking the extreme context like what we saw in SAW (yes, that freaky movie), but more to the hardships that everyone do for their living.

It is kind of mundane, going to work everyday at 7:30 AM with millions other people in this tiny land (Singapore) hopping onto train just to get to office. Men wearing well ironed shirts and trousers plus loafers. And women wearing more variety of clothing that is somewhat still considered to be 'formal' enough. Arriving the Central Business District, everyone rush to the exit and dozens of people are waiting for us - yes, as in the commuter. Holding hundreds of brochure, standing beside piles of free newspaper, and trying to give us anything they hold, one by one. Sometimes we need them, but most of the time we pretend that they don't exist. Taking the escalator up, more people are waiting for us, with brochures defnitely. There are also people doing fund raising for something I don't know what. One big guy was walking around selling some souvenirs to raise fund for his relative (probably) who is suffering a serious (again, probably. I did not see the his notice board clearly) disease. Even more surprising, there are people who beg for money. Yes, like what we usually see in Indonesia and in other developing country. But this is in Singapore, a country with virtually zero percent of poverty. Well, nowadays people tend to measure economic power from spending instead of income.

I don't know how should I react. I feel sad yet I am sure that I can not help every single of them. Nor that I feel bad for not helping them because of all the limitation. And it is not any random people responsibility. I don't think being lazy is the sole reason of poverty. What I am sure is that, everyone should and are doing their best in life. See you next post, Insya Allah..

Hi, Welcome to the Real World I

It is summer now. And typically, summer is associated with things like going to beach, stay over at friend's, backpacking, and so on. However, that is not the case for Asian students who is living not so far away from the equator that makes beaches nonsense. Having inspired by my fellow Singaporean friends (and some kiasu Indonesian friends), I decided to take a summer internship in a banking and finance sector (yes, my major is pure physics where you learn how to get 3/2 in the kinetic theory of gases). Internship is actually compulsory for some majors like engineering or business, and not for me. However, I feel the urge of exploring new knowledge apart of the thing that I am used to.

So far, one week has passed and things went pretty much plain except for some data entry projects (like typing  tons of information from a magazine to excel file). But that is not the main point of the story, I learned how life works in a different way. For example, I always thought that finance and banking are the most boring job that exists in the world but actually they are really interesting (since I have not met the electrodynamics of finance anyway). I feel like my 'financial consciousness' has finally awaken from an uber long hibernation. And reading corporate finance textbook plus random wikipedia article for 8 hours is also very interesting (including history of Myanmar, biography of Dalai Lama or even sophisticated philosophy related article). And my conclusion is, money is important (you don't say), but reading wikipedia article is much more interesting.