Blog 8 Open your heart to the new friends here

Open your heart to the new friends here

  I was taught by my parents that the first thing to do when arriving in a new place is to make friends there. And I did find it useful as it made you feel at home. Having staying in Singapore for nearly 6 months, we have made a lot of new friends from almost every province in China. However, besides some of befrienders, we have rarely made other peer Singaporean friends. It is mainly because during the bridging course, we have little access to contact some of them. Another reason is that we tend to draw an invisible line between two groups of students.

An obvious example is the word “senior”. The first time I heard the word “senior” in Singapore, I associated it with all the senior students in NUS. However, I was told that the word only means those who are from China. I felt a little confused, as in my anticipation in China, those who are in higher grades are all called predecessors, or seniors. I was also disappointed that the word seems to make our predecessors into a much smaller group. I still wonder how we call other Singaporean “seniors”. Schoolmates? Granted, many projects that we are involved as PRC SM students may vary from that of local students. The advice received from PRC seniors can be more direct.

In fact, Singaporean students can also give us a hand. I still remember the first few days when I just settled down here. It was really tough as I cannot contact to the Internet. Meanwhile, my PRC seniors were still on their holiday in China. It was girl, who was in her 4^th year in NUS, helped me out. When she knew my situation, she just gave me her account and password of wireless@sg. Her kindness was out of my expectation.

Though two groups of students do have their own features, we tend to pay too much attention to the differences. What’s more, we unconsciously assume that the either part would care about staying with each other in campus activities. In fact, according to our survey in CCA, both two groups of students are open-minded and willing to cooperate with each other. It did not agree with our hypothesis, but ironed out our worry.

Less than three months later, we will be matriculated into NUS officially. It will be the first time we are completely exposed to the higher education as well as the locals. Challenges will come follow anyway, like the language fluency, cultural shock as well as different teaching style. But I do believe that it is necessary for us to build a broader mind to the larger group of students, open our heart to new friends and embrace the university life.