Scholarship application woes…..

HI! These few days I’ve been obsessed with preparing all the documents needed for me to apply for these two financial aids (for my studies) and I’ve come to realise that I’ve become super dependent on my boyfriend lately. ==

Okay before I get into that, let me talk a bit about my experience in getting these documents ready and see if I can help you with a bit of tips if ever you need to apply for any scholarships.

When I graduated from secondary school, I tried to apply for the JPA scholarship to study overseas but unfortunately with my less-than-perfect results, I was rejected. After the rejection, my self-esteem took a dip and the dejection only intensified when my best friend, Cherrie got the scholarship. Okay I know I sound like I had sour grapes, but that is not true lah ok. Cherrie was the top student of the year and she scored an almost perfect 10A+ and 1A for her SPM so of course she deserved the scholarship. But when you apply for something at the same timeframe as your friend, of course you would feel a bit, I don’t know, upset about how you fell short right?

Anyway so I joined Form 6 and during my last year, I worked my ass off for STPM. Ok lah to be honest I didn’t really work my ass off, I just became…more interested in my studies at that point because I was beginning to grasp the essentials of the subjects I took. I got excellent results for my exams and trial exam and foolish me thought that STPM would be a piece of cake. Of course I overestimated my capabilities and didn’t score higher than 3.75. My initial aim was to get 4.0 (what did I say about overestimating my capabilities?) but I told myself I would be okay with anything above 3.75 too because I wanted to try for JPA (but this time a scholarship for local studies) again and University Malaya (which both, I was told, only accepted CGPAs of 3.75 and above). As you can imagine, I was chao tah devastated when I got my STPM results but I sat dejectedly waiting for my acceptance letter (for both platforms) nevertheless.

In the end I got accepted into UM (the CGPA thing is a LIE! I guess for certain courses you do need such results (like Econs, Engineering, etc) but I was looking to enrol in Art courses so I worried for nothing. BAH. But of course if you are of a certain race, then atrocious results might also get you into UM to fulfil the ‘race quota’ anyway, as usual) but JPA rejected me. Having been rejected twice (once after SPM, now after STPM), especially after having gone through the tedious process of procuring all the required documents, not to mention various stamps and signatures from professional people to validate the documents, you can sort of understand how shattered I was at the news.

When I first applied for the JPA scholarship for overseas studies, I didn’t think ahead and only had 1 copy of all the necessary documents I needed for scholarship application. This means that when I applied for the JPA scholarship the second time, I had to do everything all over again, stupidly. All the photocopying and chasing after headmasters and lecturers to validate your documents, man, those days were awful. However, I went through it all again, and you can imagine my disappointment when I got rejected yet again. The news is true for this I guess – if you want JPA to sponsor you, you need at least 3.75 (unless, again, if you are of a certain race – race quota mah).

ANYWAY, phew! what a huge backstory, this time, after my first year in UM, I will try AGAIN (because my first year results turned out to be surprisingly satisfactory). This time I won’t mention which scholarship I am applying for because if I don’t get it, it will be too much lah and I don’t want to show that in my blog! This time I made several copies of all required documents in case I need them for future use! So for the last few weeks I went around looking for ADUNs around Selangor and after some exhausting efforts, I located one who actually COMES to his office as stated on the info board (it may be news to you, but a lot of ADUNs just happy-happy come into the office anytime they like, if at all, without regarding the schedule that is pinned on the info board about their supposed appearance at any time. Very big-shot one).

The ADUN I looked for is ADUN of Sg. Pinang and he is none other than YB Dato’ Teng Chang Khim hahahaha I don’t know why but everytime I read his name I feel very close to him like he is my father wtf. Maybe because we share same (Chinese) surnames lol. Anyway, YB’s office in the same building as the steamboat opposite Pelangi Apartment in Klang (behind Klang Parade, it’s the only steamboat shop there, so no missing it). If you look to the top floor you will see the DAP logo so just go up there and you will see him (ok lah, his staff. He only comes to office at 9pm-11pm on Wednesdays. Yes, P.M.)!

I am very glad I found him because the office boy there is very chop-chop and be done and wastes no time in helping you get the stamps and signatures needed. Don’t worry too much about producing flawless evidence/original copies for your photostated documents to be validated though, because they are all quite lax in the office. I mean, be prepared with your evidence lah at least but no need to be too worried about it. They usually don’t ask much.

This photo has zero connection with this post so just ignore it ok. Then again, every photo in this blog post also got no connection with anything in this entry hahahaha. Never mind, they are chio!

So my tips when applying for scholarships:

1. Always make at least 5 copies of all your documents. (This includes photos and yes, always take passport sized photos with a BLUE background – NO white, no matter how apt you think it is.) Get EVERYTHING stamped and validated at one go. Even if you think you might not need them anymore, just make extra, they will probably come in useful one day.
   
2. Use the Internet to look for ADUNs, Pengerusi JKKK, Ketua Kampung etc in your area. Don’t hesitate to call their office to enquire; they are used to this type of work so they will know what kind of advice/instructions to give you.
   
3. Prepare your documents completely (bring originals to validate the photocopies) before bringing them over to the professional people/ADUN to be validated. They usually do not entertain incomplete sets of documents.
   
4. If your cumulative family income (mother’s income + father’s income + whoever else who is working’s income) is more than RM1.5k, the scholarship people will not entertain your application. If you insist on applying, however, either prepare for rejection or fake your family income statement.
   
5. Don’t go around telling people that I am the one who taught you the previous trick.
   
6. Lastly, if you really want to prove that you appreciate the scholarship, put effort into your studies and don’t waste the financial aid buying nonsense la ok. Even if you want to spend, make sure you have enough to pay for tuition, and also make sure you DO WELL in your studies.
   
7. Don’t waste your time in university if you don’t intend to do your best. Many other people want your spot you know.
   

Good luck trying and don’t hesitate to ask for help ok! Either from seniors or older siblings or even me wtf. My blog is always open lah ok I will try to help if I can. :D

CHIO!

BYE!

P/S: I forgot to talk about how dependent I am on my boyfriend lately wtf. Oh well, I guess that will have to make for another blog post. :D

The McGurk Effect

Seriously, I learn the strangest things from 9gag.

This gif-gag I saw featured two elephants playing on a see-saw and even though the gif emmited no sounds, the visuals of the gif made a slight thud in my head everytime the elephant landed on the ground. O.O

http://9gag.com/gag/a6wQjDA

If you can't understand what I mean, here is the link to the gag itself. See if you can hear the slight thud sound your brain makes you hear.

Anyway, so I was immensely fascinated by this and I went to Google it. And I found an explanatory video of what the McGurk Effect is. IT IS SO FASCINATING LAH. If you think you had control of what your brain interpret what it sees or hears, think again. O.O

http://www.wimp.com/mcgurkeffect/

Sorry I couldn't embed the video, just click on the link and watch for yourselves ok.

Seriously though, do not always believe what your eyes tell you to hear! O.O

myBurgerLab

HALO!

Someone please throw confetti all over me because I’ve been blogging so often! LOL So, you know how I’ve been shouting all over the place about how I wanted to try out the burgers at myBurgerLab right…and I finally did!

About some weeks ago my beloved boyfriend brought me to myBurgerLab at Seapark to try them out. Previously we’d come before, and knowing that the shop opened at 5.00pm, we arrived there at 4.45pm to beat the queue.

Unfortunately, just as we parked our car across the road, we were greeted by a queue of about 7 groups of people and we decided to just leave and come back another day because we were already really hungry.

So this time, we came at 4.30pm and the queue had already started but it wasn’t too long. We came mentally prepared for the queue this time, so the idea of standing in the hot weather outside a (still) closed shop like idiots was easier to bear.

After 30 minutes under the sweltering weather, at 5.00pm sharp, the lovely people of myBurgerLab pulled the doors open and we were invited to queue in the comforting air-conditioned interior of the quaint and hipster looking shop.

In front of us were about 4-5 packs of customers so it gave us time to read through the menu board at the front to decide what we would have. The burgers were named quirkily, IE one dubbed the Hangover, another Beautiful Mess, The Hulk etc and all of them were different combinations of interesting and delicious ingredients.

I decided on having a Beautiful Mess, which was a beef burger featuring a generous piece of crispy hashbrown and sautéed mushrooms. Zeus decided on the Hangover, which was a beef burger as well but featured a Portobello mushroom and a sunny side up. We both had add-on orders of caramelised onions because onions (caramelised or not) are my favourite!

Ta-daaaa!

My Beautiful Mess (Hashbrown and sauteed mushrooms)

The Hangover (Deep-fried Portobello mushroom + sunny side up)

Really looks like a Beautiful Mess right? LOL

The buns are black because they are charcoal buns! They have a soft texture and taste almost like regular burger buns but slightly sweeter with a somewhat smoky undertone. The beef patty is tender and you can tell, homemade, and seasoned quite nicely. Looks good right? :D

The place was packed to the brim! Many early-birds (including us) who managed to secure seats were subconsciously forced to eat quickly, as we didn’t want hold up the later customers and have them eat while standing. So after polishing off our burgers (quite quickly I must say, to my surprise, as I am usually a slow eater) we left the place to allow the newer customers our seats. Have to be considerate!

I conclude that Zeus’s burger tasted much better than mine because the egg added a bit more flavour to the taste whereas my feature ingredient, the hashbrown, although good on its own, when eaten in a burger didn’t bring out any special flavours. In fact, it tasted a bit jelat, like overpowering, because the bread and hashbrown were both carbs. The sautéed mushrooms in my burger were really good though. The caramelised onions we ordered should have improved the taste of our burgers but they only added a small portion of it to our burgers so we were quite unhappy.

I actually complained about this in Instagram and the myBurgerLab people actually came and commented their apology on my photo! Hahaha, so to compensate for that they actually gave me a coupon of a free burger set for my next visit to myBurgerLab! They also told us that if anytime in future we feel that our add-ons are not enough, we can ask for more at the counter and they will happily pile on more onions, egg, mushrooms etc to our request! Talk about wanting to satisfy your customers! They are awesome!

All in all, I would say that the burgers are worth the long waiting queue, but only for the first time, though. :/ I mean, I won’t say that the burgers sucked, but to be honest, they aren’t particularly delicious. Without ketchup and mustard, the burgers tasted a bit bland on their own. If I had to give it a rating, I’d say, maybe 7/10. It is worth a first try though, so go ahead and give it a shot. I mean, I only tasted two types so far, and my sister is in love with their burgers, so different people can have different verdicts right?

So go ahead and try and see what you think!

2nd anniversary

8 August 2013 marks the second anniversary of my effortlessly blissful relationship with my beloved boyfriend! Coincidentally my parents’ wedding anniversary also falls on the 8^th of August but they’ve been separated for many years already so I don’t know why I’m even mentioning this haha. But it’s such an odd coincident right? :D

Okay lah to tell the truth, the the 8 August 2011 isn’t really the date we got together officially, but kind of the date we got faux married on Facebook wtf. Hahahaha. What happened was I was quite heart-broken and devastated when my ex dumped me so the rebel in me decided to crawl its way out into the open to take over my life. I was excessively flirty with everyone, trying to get boys’ attention and was also super active in my social life that few months after I broke up. It was like I was trying to avenge my broken heart or something. So what better way to show my prick of an ex how it’s done than to get Facebook married to a guy after only parting ways for about 2 months?

So anyway, what was meant to be a joke turned serious and we officially became a couple about a month later. And together we’ve been for two years! :D I only have one thing to say about this though: Be careful what you wish for it might just come true. HAH!

This year we didn’t do anything fancy. We just did what we enjoyed the most and that is, enjoy each other’s company! Hehehe.

He got me a set of beauty products from Body Shop, all strawberry flavoured!

 

He says that I am a strawberry because I used to have green hair,

like this, and red cheeks (fake one, blusher lol) so now I can smell like one too! Haha I love it!

In return, I didn’t get him anything (I am terrible girlfriend) as I’m quite broke after my trip to Bangkok, so I just made him…

CUPCAKES! Hehe got his name one! It’s homemade chocolate sauce as well. I am a baking genius thankyouverymuch.

It is orange flavoured, hence the colour and also bits of pink lah cos I couldn’t resist pink cupcakes!!! Hehe he said he loved it leh! I am so touched hahaha

Later, we went for dinner at Tony Roma’s to try their famous beef ribs as recommended by Zeus’s (I won’t call my boyfriend by his real name anymore from this blog post onwards) brother and they were really quite fab leh! (I can’t remember the name of the ribs I ordered, but it’s the one that costs about RM70.)

Wah, I didn’t realise the photos I took were so bad wtf

Don’t blame me lah ok, I didn’t use any pro camera, just the camera of my HTC Incredible S HAHA!

The meat was very tender and didn’t have that overpowering beefy taste at all! The gravy was really nicely seasoned too! I highly recommend this to everyone!

Oh, and also, to those who do not eat beef, you really don’t know what you’re missing out leh!

The mash potato was good too! I usually dislike mash potato because I prefer potato cooked with a bit of bite (al dente? LOL) but this one was really buttery and fragrant. It had bits of potato skin in it which countered the mushy taste of the mash so I liked it! I can’t eat mashed potato at like KFC because it is too mushy and it feels disgusting. But this one is good!

For appetiser we decided to try their potato soup. Zeus was sceptical at first, as he always is with any food that doesn’t fall into the ‘conventional’ category, but in the end we agreed to try it lah. It was good! Even Zeus also loved it hor. I can’t be sure if they made the soup from scratch or if they concocted it from a premixed pack, but all in all, it tasted quite good lah. Seasoned at just the right amount and creamy but yet not too overwhelming. Worth a try! (No photos because soups don’t look fab in print ah.)

We also ordered a Caesar’s salad to share and it was really quite good too! It was really worth it as well because for RM19.90, we had our salad served under a big gigantic slab of crispy chicken chop. The meal also comes with an alternative order of grilled chicken, if you prefer it to be less fatty. But of course we ordered the crispy one because crispy food is Zeus’s favourite lol.

After dinner we just walked around and didn’t do muchloh. We just went window shopping, but mostly just talking to each other and laughing and that was the best! It was a great night! I am always super happy when I spend time with my boyfriend. Nothing can go wrong one!

Wish to have more anniversaries like this with Zeus. Love you bb!

Everybody’s got a dark side.

I know I’ve always had on a cheerful, everything-is-going-my way kind of attitude, but deep down I guess I have a lot of dark secrets as well. It’s been a long time since I’ve even thought about all the things I don’t like about myself. The reason I stopped owes to the fact that Xiaxue advocated The Secret and seeing that it worked (and is still doing) wonders for her, I decided to give it a shot.

But I haven’t been religiously practising positive thinking recently, even though the few months before this (during the beginning of the year) I have been doing so well channelling positive energy into my life. You can see how things turned out for me by reading my previous post. But I don’t know, these few weeks, I’ve been feeling so…pathetic.

Maybe it’s because I’m having a two-month break from university and that gives me ample free time to think a lot about things. Maybe the lack of activities in my daily life has brought me to thinking about how amazingly dull my life currently is. Maybe I’m just being really ungrateful with what I have and am greedy to have more. Maybe I should stop thinking about what my life lacks and instead focus more on what I already have.

I know I shouldn’t be writing this if I want to go back to practising The Secret. But I feel like I have to let my feelings out...to find closure. I feel like I have to at least get my feelings out in the open to be able to find the door to close upon them. Keeping these dark secrets inside has made me a person of tough exterior, when in actual fact, I may just be one of the most emotional people I know in my life.

My Darkest Secret #1: My Weight

Currently: 72kg, 172cm

Ever since I was young, I have always struggled with the issue of my weight. The last time I remember being skinny was when I was about 4 years old. I had little cute dresses and shorts and I never really gave much thought about how I looked. Well, I guess only being abnormal does one get self-conscious, right?

I started realising that I was abnormally-sized when I was at about 5-6 years old. I had gained a lot of weight and had become obviously chubby and round-figured. Soon, nicknames were picked for me and amongst them were Sam Cang Yok (in Cantonese, meaning 3-layered-pork, because of my overlapping tummy), Fei Poh (fatty), Fifi (I guess an abbreviation from Fatty wtf), all of these mostly from my family. And it became even worse when I started primary school because my friends, mostly guys, started calling me Elephant, Giant etc. So I guess you can sort of see how being fat or big boned is a large part of my life and definitely has moulded my personality today.

Soon when I hit puberty I sort shot upwards and became taller so I guess I wasn’t so round-figured anymore but still every now and then people would tease me about my weight. I really disliked it but I’d never shown it because people would just be like “What are you angry for, it’s the fact isn’t it?” And things didn’t improve when I shared this problem with my sister and she would just go, “But it’s true what.” It’s like I’d never really had someone I could talk to about my weight because they all thought alike and that was that I was fat and there was nothing to talk about.

So as I was saying, I grew taller and one day somehow I was looking myself in the mirror and for the first time I saw that I was actually quite pretty wtf. I know I sound a bit siao but really I actually said out loud, “Wah I’m quite pretty leh.” wtf hahahaha. My face became less chubby because I was stretched vertically (wtf hahahahaha) and also my eyes became bigger and rounder. I guess being a subject of teasing all my life never really allowed me to think of myself as being even okay-looking, so that particular day was definitely a turning point for me. The second turning point for me was when I was in Standard 5 or 6 I think. Now, I am going to be really honest and say that I started to become a much more confident self after one of my classmates Randy Swee wrote in his diary that he liked me and Sally because he thought we were both pretty wtf hahahahaha. What happened was, we girls kind of stole his diary and wouldn’t return it to him. We actually even went to hide in the girls’ toilet so that he couldn’t reach us. And then when I read through it I was really shocked lah. I mean, I never would have thought that his crush would be me (at least one of his crushes wtf) because in class they always teased me about my weight. But after that I definitely started becoming more conscious about how I could make myself look good. So thanks ah Randy wtf

This topic is becoming seriously long but never mind lah. I need an ego boost so I’m going to talk excessively about myself and you just have to suck it up! HAHAHAHA. So after that I started to take more effort in choosing what to wear, how to do my hair, I even got contact lens so that I wouldn’t have to wear glasses. Soon I ventured into make-up and discovered that I could make myself look even better. I also went to straighten my hair and soon I started to realise that boys would check me out when I walk by.

That was the time I realised that even though I am big boned, if I had a pretty face, it would overshadow my weight. And that concludes why I am currently so obsessed with make-up and clothes wtf. So, about my weight, I still get shit for it even till today. But I am happy to say that nowadays people usually put me in the ‘pretty’ category rather than the ‘ugly’ category despite my weight. But sometimes when people do talk about how I’m overweight, I get obsessively annoyed and would become moody and irritated.

Who gives anybody the right to tease someone about his or her inadequacies? I mean, I would never do that to someone’s face. Yes, we do talk behind people’s backs but making comments about someone to someone’s face is just plain rude and proud, isn’t it? Having the guts to voice out a person’s apparent flaw to his/her face just shows how arrogantly pompous you are to think that you, yourself, are perfect. Just keep the ‘good-natured’ correction comments to yourself, nobody really likes to be criticised, no matter how ‘constructive’ your ‘advice’ may be.

Tell a girl she’s pretty and she’ll forget it tomorrow; but tell a girl she’s ugly and she’ll remember it for a lifetime.

So till today, I still live with this dark secret. I have been having issues with my weight a big portion of my life and no matter how many times my boyfriend tells me I’m beautiful the way I am, I still find it hard to let it go. I just want to be beautiful by my own standards and that means, deep down, I do realise that I have a few pounds to lose. But I will pull through. I will lose weight. One day, I want to be able to say that I have done it, I’ve reached my personal standards, and I will be a wholesomely happy me. And nobody’s going to say shit to my face ever again.

P/S: I will do part 2 in the coming post…if you are interested to read.