“Talking about durians is always a very thorny issue.” -ZC

Back from my KL trip! And thrown straight into a damn long day of school, which started at 8am and was only saved by Prof Tambyah, who turns out to be an awesome lecturer.

I have to say it really felt like a holiday. Stay in hotel… eat nice breakfast for 3 days…

I wish I had been less whiny before leaving, but anyway, it turned out to be totally worthwhile. Missed AHM on Sunday, which was sad, but there will be other chances and this was once in a lifetime. An academic competition, who’d have thought?

Thursday we went for lectures, which I thought was quite garang of us, then straight to the airport to fly off in the afternoon. I’m happy I brought a camera to record exactly how ZC whipped out his endocrine notes 5 minutes into the flight. Intense.

Ok so I can’t really say much cos I did bring more notes than maybe all of them combined. My bag was pretty heavy hahaha.

We flew Jetstar, which was my first time flying budget. It was a very empty flight. This African man a few rows behind us kicked up a huge fuss cos he wanted to sit in the emergency exit seats, but they were asking him to pay extra. The pilot had to make an announcement. heh.

We touched down in KL within 45 minutes so it didn’t really feel like we had left. Quite weird. Then went down to our hotel, which we found out later has a really dubious, um, “health spa.”

Thursday night was the “interaction” down at UM hostel. My first surprise was seeing ppl from Czech universities there… o_O Although none of them was actually Czech – 2 Germans and a few Malaysians, Ben, Katherina & Esmon. The friendliest ppl we met were the Taiwanese from NCKU (National Cheng Kung University – talk about the right mindset for success) – Hong Wei etc, awesome bunch. ZX also made friends with the Thais from Chulalongkorn University. Maybe the most gratifying thing we learned that night was that our accommodation option was not wasted.

Finished about 10.30pm. We managed to not find a taxi until we’d walked about halfway to our hotel, that was pretty exciting.

The next day was the written test. Of the 37 competing teams only 16 could go through, based on average scores. We didn’t really know what kinds of questions would come up, so I (at least) had low expectations. It was 165 T/F, 80 minutes with negative marking, and it turned out to be fairly similar to our MCQs (except for some anal numbers questions), so it was alright. We came out thinking we had a fair chance of making it.

The results were going to be announced at the concert that night, so we had a few hours in the afternoon to kill. Since it would be pretty wasted to not see KL while in KL (PJ, technically), we went to Mid Valley mall. They have a great pet shop, with iguanas.

Prof Hooi came down to fetch us to the UM hostel for the concert. It’s disturbing that he only showed up then, seemed to take for granted that we would make it to Day 2, hahaha.

The concert was… interesting – 100% for effort, but the food was good, and the NCKU display was actually really something special. Of course, nobody could really concentrate properly when Prof Cheng was announcing who made the top 16 at intervals in between the performances. Argh, the suspense.

I still remember the pressure. We would have been really pai-seh if we didn’t make it, I mean, Prof Hooi was there. And our accommodation was paid for. Arg.

So the 13th to 16th teams were announced. Not us.

Then a few performances. Then the 9th to 12th teams. Not us. I went to the toilet.

Then the top 8 seeds were going to be announced. Prof Cheng did this very cruel thing, which was to get the 13th to 16th placings to come up and draw a playing card from his hand – A to 8. This would be the seeded university they would meet in the round of 16.

The air could crack, the tension was so thick.

They revealed number 6. Then number 2 (UM, which raised a loud cheer lol). Then number 4 (CUHK I think). Then the top seed – Chulalongkorn University.

So then we had to sit through another round of performances. Agony.

I remember this very clearly because I was down there thinking over and over in my head, “3, 5, 7, 8… 3, 5, 7, 8… 3, 5, 7, 8…”

So then the performances ended. And the 9th to 12th place teams were called up, and number 7 was drawn. Not us. Then number 3 (Philippines University College of Medicine). Argh.

Then AIMST came up and drew number 5. When Prof Cheng said “National University of Singapore” I felt my insides fizzle up in relief.

Seriously, how cruel is that? We could have been spared the distress if he’d revealed the 5th to 8th seeds first hahaha. Incidentally, UNSW were the last revealed, seeded 8th (they were the only Australian university there, good for them).

That night we drew lots in the hotel room for which 3 of us would go up in the round of 16. Tense moment haha. HL and I were spared the pressure of sending us into the QFs.

Saturday was the oral round. We went up against AIMST in the 5th session, which had cheem questions like never seen before in previous rounds. ZX, ZC and Grace handled the pressure well and put us through, 15-7.

This was when I really started to believe that we could do it. Haha.

We were set to face the 3rd seed, PUCM, in the QFs. As far as I could tell, based on their first round performance, we’d be able to put up a good fight. We were the last QF to play.

After the first 3 QFs (in which UNSW pulled off a shocking upset over top seeds CU – partly, I think, due to language barrier, CU might have won otherwise), we really thought we had a chance, since most of the questions were up our alley – a lot of CVS, respi, renal questions.

So we went up against PUMC and lost, 24-16. To be fair, their factual knowledge was much better than ours, and a lot of the questions were factual. Plus there were a few neuro questions, which totally killed us. Bummer. It was over by the time the last question was asked, which was pretty demoralizing since we’d been gaining confidence hahaha.

Well, it’s ok. UM went on to beat UNSW in the finals. They deserved it lah, there wasn’t really any intentional bias. They’d probably have pwned us in the semis.

That night went out for consolation dinner / durian feast. Heh. And so ended my first (and probably only) academic competition. Quite fun.  Got to meet new people and see how we matched up to others, and despite the fact that I now have a truckload of stuff to catch up on, I think it was worth it.

This was like an essay.