Disclaimer: I won't be getting any sleep tonight - T..T
Assalamualaikum (Peace be upon you) !
We already reached a quarter of Ramadhan this year, and disappointedly I failed to sort out my life schedule during this holy month. For the first time, I feel the pressure of being a final year student. Not because the subjects are getting harder but the tedious and enormous mount of works I need to do - that includes research (filtering credited journals and papers), doing a summary of those journals so that I understand them better and won't have problems in relating them to my thesis and study according to my lecturers, writing drafts of which I usually stumbled upon writer's block (well writing a thesis is not the same as ranting in a blog but the state of being blur and cloudy and inanimate brain activities are merely the same), and also freaking out that I might give up on this final year project (FYP).
But then as much as there is a swirling of emotions between do and procrastinate, anxiety and fear couldn't contain my love of procrastination as if it has occurred to me to be a natural thing, like breathing. I sometimes, out of my cluelessness of what to type on the empty sheet of white space of word document, find myself regretting my choice for choosing geotechnical engineering as my major while being good and has a relatively good grade in structural engineering. I know some of you may not recognize this field of engineering, or never heard about it, let's just say, it's your choice when going to a fusion restaurant. In wide range of food, what kind of food you like or prefer - mexican, japanese, local malay food, chinese, etc - to word it metaphorically.
I realized the usual last minute effort and struggle weren't effective for long term research (about half a year). Preparation is needed and by far the most important factor in planning a project. It's hard reality that I seems to forget because being in a malaysian university, the junior and sophomore years are quite easy, well I didn't say about the exams being easy, the course structure and outline and the program outcome they expected us to learn are simple and basic - understanding and apply the knowledge of the subject. And the project for each engineering subject is submitted on papers, with research on google and wikipedia and copy paste and so forth, dismissing the culture of academia of cultivating proper research methodology.
And that being said, to sum it up, I am lazy student who wish things would just stay the same till I graduated. The exam based evaluation and the significance of getting good grade in exam - kind of a mind control mechanism for academic assessment - are still intact even at tertiary level. Not really obvious but it's obviously there. So, I'm practically ruined inside, but yeah, I have encountered this type of fear of rejection and failure many times before and I just need to work my lazy ass here. A diligent student !
And for Ramadhan, I fear I'm being the same. There's no change at all. Ramadhan is a catalyst for people to be drawn to goodness. If before we are Muslims, and now we become practising Muslims. If we overlook the fact that Allah has granted us every year 30 days of change and we couldn't even take advantage of it, we are really at loss.
May we desire change, and may our change remains.
Allahumma baligna Ramadhan.
