Jonathan's Year in Review 2020

I was shocked to discover recently that the decade is ending on 31 December 2020. I had been under the impression that it had ended last year, because you count from 2010 to 2019, then 2020 to 2029, and so on right? But apparently not. Between mirthful snorts of laughter at my ignorance, my father explained it to me like this: There was no year 0. The first year was 1. So the decades are counted as follows: 1 to 10, 11 to 20, ... 2011 to 2020, 2021 to 2030, and so on.

I had never felt more stupid in my life. My whole life has been a fucking lie!

Anyway, since this year is such a milestone being the end of a decade and all, I thought I should take a moment (actually several thousand moments, because this whopper of a post is going to take me quite a while to write) to look back on the year and the decade as a whole, and reflect on all that's happened.

Decade in review: 2011 to 2020

This section won't be as long as you might expect. I mean, a lot of things happen in a 10-year period, but I won't be cramming the entire decade's worth of stuff in here. And it's not for editorial reasons either. No, the reason is much more straightforward: I don't remember.

Indeed, I'm getting on in age, and feeling the effects of every single day of wear and tear on my body, mind, and spirit. So unfortunately, I do get senior moments increasingly often, including forgetfulness and the dreaded tip-of-the-tongue phenomenon where I want to say a particular word but it remains just beyond reach of my consciousness and I end up stuttering like an idiot for a few seconds until my brain kicks back into gear and catches up. A neurological disorder like spinal muscular atrophy affects only my physical health directly; that much is true. In fact, this decade has been marked by a noticeable decline in my condition and I give myself at best even odds of making it through the next decade alive and an almost 0% chance of making it to the end of the one after. But even though the mental and intellectual parts of me are not affected by the disease, when the body has to commit almost all of its resources to keeping itself running, the mind and spirit do suffer from deprivation and, as a result, they do deteriorate as well.

That's not to say I'm a dullard. I know I'm not. I'm damn good at what I do, and I have only gotten smarter over the course of the decade. A lot of this has to do with my tertiary education.

First, I took the unorthodox step of opting for a polytechnic diploma course rather than following the traditional junior college route after finishing secondary school. (For my overseas readers: Polytechnic is a bit like what the Americans call "community college". It focuses more on knowledge that is relevant to the real world. Junior college is a continuation of the traditional school system where students learn the standard subjects like calculus, chemistry, literature, and so on.)

Polytechnic was great. I studied psychology, and although many of the theories and research techniques I had to memorise have since faded into the fog of history, the important principles remain and have influenced the way I navigate social relations and the big, bad world out there. It matured me as a person, turning me from a book-smart teen who was utterly lost when asked to do anything that didn't involve examination papers into someone a little more shrewd, streetwise, and capable.

I also learned other useful skills like Microsoft Office, which is wonderful because I don't know how I would have learned it otherwise. Knowing how to use Microsoft Word, PowerPoint, Outlook, and Excel is a basic requirement for all office jobs, so I'm glad I had good instruction in them. It certainly saved me a lot of bungling around when I went for my internships.

Speaking of internships, I've done two. To me, the key takeaways from them were not subject-matter expertise and domain knowledge, but the more intangible aspects. I learned to trust myself more, as I consistently produced work of such quality that I ultimately got a full-time job offer from my second internship firm. I have struggled with feelings of inadequacy and self-doubt all my life, wondering if I will ever be "good enough", so this was a balm to my soul.

Of course, I cannot forget the relationships I formed along the way. I was so lucky to have been surrounded by colleagues who were welcoming and accommodating. They readily took me into the fold and treated me as one of their own. Even though I'm no longer working at my first internship firm, I'm still in contact with some of the colleagues I grew closer to through social media and instant messaging.

And outside of internships, how can I forget the friends that fate so kindly sent my way? Three deserve a special mention (initials are used for privacy and I have purposely written very vague details to remove potentially identifying information):

SOF, whom I randomly messaged one day because I was obsessed with a certain adorable mascot and he was a manager at the organisation the mascot represents. He turned out to be a really cool guy with quite a similar personality to me (along with matching fierce faces which don't smile easily), so we are now good friends.

LS, whose job it was to take care of me at one of the educational institutions I attended. Instead of treating me as just another case on her files, she bothered to fight through my tough exterior (didn't I mention I have a fierce face?) and get to know the awesome person trapped inside. She hasn't fled from me yet, so I guess she decided I'm not that bad.

(I only met the third friend this year, so I will talk about her in the next section.)

And that's the thing. People who do manage to break through my defences often find that I'm a pretty okay guy. It's like the old saying: "She's a bitch until you actually get to know her."

How did I become a bitch? Think of it this way. When you do a lot of manual work with your hands, you accumulate superficial damage on your skin which results in the formation of calluses, right? The same thing happens with emotions.

In my case, I have been fighting a battle that has lasted for 23 years and counting. Every day is a struggle as my banged-up body fights to sustain the increasing demands of a perfectly healthy and active mind which wants to do anything and everything. And as they say, the spirit is willing but the flesh is weak.

The public only sees the "idealised" version of me through the media. They think I'm a superman who has overcome my disease and achieved amazing feats. But I haven't. As a child, I lost countless hours of sleep just lying in bed ruminating about my life, wondering "why me?", thinking of the possibilities in life that could have been, and despairing about everything I would lose out on. But those thoughts and feelings would have done me no good at all. They would have turned me into an emotional wreck that couldn't function. So I learned to shut them away in the deepest, darkest corner of my heart. And there they have mostly remained, save for the occasional incident where some of them escape and I become moody for a while until the miscreant is locked up again by the passage of time. Time does heal wounds, after all.

But bottling up my fears and sadness came at a price. I became extremely guarded against anything that might cause me distress, because I wanted to avoid triggering another wave of negativity and setting my demons free again. There was only one problem: if you think about it, "anything that might cause me distress" basically encompasses life itself. In life, shit happens. And so I expended so much energy fretting and worrying and being anxious about this, that, and the other, that I sapped my own soul and became a neurotic empty husk of a human being. This state of affairs persists until the present day. Psychologists would say I have a flattened affect: my eyes are dull and lifeless, and my face fails to convey the full range of human emotions.

So that's the story of how I became a bitch.

How, then, is it possible that there are people, whom I call my friends, who have discovered another version of me? Well, first they had to get past my flattened affect which, admittedly, is very off-putting. Communicating via messaging apps has been a godsend in this regard because they don't have to see my face. Once they had done that, they then had to convince me that it was safe to let them get close to me. The true me, the one who has spent 23 years cowering in the inner sanctum of my mind, trying to avoid getting eaten by the demons who have made it their mission to destroy him once and for all.

That's the version of me who is really nice. He's great fun, has a sense of humour, is kind, and cares a lot for the few people who get through to him. But he does all that to mask his own problems, as well as seek vicarious happiness in others and do his bit to save others from going through the same pain as him, as much as he can. He's very selective though, because he doesn't have all the time in the world to be nice to all and sundry. He does need to remain alert against those demons, you know.

Would I change the way I am? Honestly, no. I find that my bitchiness is a great filter that keeps out the riff-raff whose continued presence in my life would serve no purpose other than to weigh me down and piss me off. The people who truly matter will self-select by persevering through the facade of bitchiness. In this way, I don't have to spend time and energy looking for friends. The ones who are worth having will come to me. I make a clear distinction between acquaintances and friends and don't use the word "friend" willy-nilly. The people who get the label of "friend" have earned their stripes. I don't need or want a ton of friends. That would be extremely tiring. I'm far happier with a tiny handful of very close ones.

And that is how I try to keep my spirit healthy. At least some part of me is holding together, albeit barely.

Year in review: 2020

How can I talk about this year without mentioning the Covid-19 pandemic? I can't, so as tired as the topic has become, I won't attempt to skirt around it.

Honestly, as the world was bitching and moaning about how distressing lockdowns were to people's emotions, I was having the time of my fucking life. Yes, all things considered, I've had quite the opposite experience of 2020 than most people. It's been a good year, and I would consider it one of the most standout high points in my life.

These are three momentous occurrences that 2020 was responsible for.

I got a gastrostomy

It was in 2018 that I noticed I had started losing strength in my throat muscles which controlled the swallowing reflex. I wrote about it here. You will see that back then, I was vehemently against the idea of being tube-fed. How perspectives change in two years.

After struggling through my meals throughout the remainder of 2018 and the entirety of 2019, I thought: "Screw it. I don't want to be spending three hours every single day for the rest of my life slaving over food. There are so many better ways to spend those three hours. Besides, I'm spending so much energy on the very act of eating that the net effect is I'm probably losing calories by burning them faster than I'm taking them in via the food, defeating the whole point of food intake!"

So I asked my doctors for a gastrostomy. It happened in 2020, and you can read about it here.

In the end, the aftermath of the procedure didn't quite go as smoothly as I described in that post. About two months after starting on the tube-feeding regimen, I developed a very wet cough that wouldn't go away. I also suddenly felt really drained of energy all the time. My ability to function in my daily life was affected, as I would have to lie in bed with my ventilator strapped to my face every time I suffered an attack of the wet cough. The lethargy was also slowing down my mind which, as you know, is the only thing on this damned body of mine that actually works properly and allows me to earn money.

I couldn't go on like that! So my doctors came and did a bunch of tests, ruling out infection. Then they more or less ran into a wall and got stumped. None of their gadgets could identify a biological reason for my symptoms. But there had to be one!

My mother remembered that when I was a child, I would get wet coughs whenever she gave me too much milk. And the formula feed I was on, Ensure Plus, was dairy-based. It was possible that I was reacting badly to it, since I was taking in 800ml of it every day.

The medical professionals were okay with my parents doing an experiment to test this hypothesis. So I began taking a reduced 600ml volume of Ensure Plus. My symptoms improved slightly but didn't totally go away. A further cutback to 400ml did the trick. After a few days on the half-diet, I felt like I was back to my old self again.

One day, the dietitian found out about a product called Isomil 3 and drew my father's attention to it. It's a dairy-free, soy-based formula for babies. I went on it for a few weeks and found that I was energetic and my lungs remained clear.

Throughout this time, my weight was fluctuating wildly. From an initial 16kg before the tube insertion, it shot up under the 800ml Ensure Plus regimen, stabilised under the 600ml one, started coming down under the 400ml one, then crashed further after the switch to Isomil. Because one of the goals that my father and the dietitian have is to keep my weight at around 20kg, they were not pleased when my weight tumbled to about 19kg. So we are still in the midst of trying to find a regimen that works optimally. But at least now we know that we need to be careful with the amount of dairy we include.

The benefits I mentioned in that post, though, endure. I don't have to fight against my failing body to eat dinner every night, so I have so much more time and energy to do other things.

Which brings me to my next momentous occurrence...

RuneScape

I know I've talked about this ad nauseam recently, especially since I've been playing it a lot during my newly freed-up evenings. But instead of waxing lyrical about the game, I'll talk about something else this time.

The wonderful thing about multiplayer role-playing games like RuneScape is the social aspect. I don't have the strength to go out and mingle with people in real life, and anyway, going anywhere is fraught with logistical complexities such as having to be transported to the destination safely and chaperoned around by an experienced caregiver, which in the vast majority of cases is my father.

So it's pretty hard for me to maintain social contact with other humans. Do I get lonely? Yeah for sure, all the time in fact, especially as I get older and see my contemporaries meet their life partners and settle down. That's something I'll never have, and although I like to look on the bright side and think about how much of my money is freed up by not having to worry about costs like a house, a car, and my children's education, allowing me to buy more nice things for myself and my loved ones in the here and now, I do sometimes wonder what would have been. I have the feeling I would've been an awesome dad, but I guess I'll never know.

We RuneScapers like to say that RuneScape is not a dating site. But what it offers me is an avenue to meet new people and make new friends. Remember the third friend I mentioned in the previous section? We met through RuneScape. Although we live very different lives on opposite sides of the planet, our values, opinions, and personalities align so closely it's actually uncanny. She's like a younger, hardier, more street-smart, and less cowardly version of me, or the baby sister I could never have.

It's also really cool finally having a friend who is around my age and not several decades older. I mean, I love my other friends like SOF and LS to bits, but I sometimes wonder at my inability to form close ties with anyone younger. Well, I don't have to wonder anymore. We get along so well, and because just like me, she is way more intelligent and keen to learn than the vast majority of our peers, we can have such deep and meaningful discussions about wide-ranging topics from culture to entertainment to current affairs. I get so exhausted making mindless small talk with airheaded people so chatting with her is extremely refreshing because she's not averse to diving into the heavy stuff. She's even willing to play Agony Aunt with me when I go all mushy and emotional, because she believes in confronting your emotions and not hiding them away. That's reflected in the music we like, which is the older type that contains meaning rather than that candy-pop Korean drivel that's so "in" these days. Have a listen to this song by a band she introduced me to which I developed a liking for.

I'm truly in awe at how fortunate I am that fate so kindly sent this very special person into my path this year. (Note: Although I have written about this friend in such glowing terms, let me make it abundantly clear that my relationship with her is strictly "BFF" in nature. This is not an Avril Lavigne song.)

I graduated and did quite well

The third momentous occurrence was when I received official confirmation that I had passed my final semester and was to be conferred my degree from the National University of Singapore, the best university in Asia and training ground of Singapore's sex offenders.

I finished with a score of 4.85 out of 5, and my degree is classed as an Honours with Highest Distinction. That was a bit of a Covid-induced fluke, to be honest. As I explained in my Facebook post announcing this happy news:

The Covid-19 pandemic gave me a better degree than I would otherwise have gotten.

My cumulative average point (CAP) was well on track to qualifying me for an Honours with Highest Distinction. But to get Honours with Highest Distinction in regular times, there was an additional hurdle: a thesis had to be written. If a student got a CAP of more than 4.5 but did not write a thesis, they would only get an Honours with Distinction, which is the class below Honours with Highest Distinction.

Such was my distaste for research, however, that I was willing to accept the lower class of Honours in return for not having to suffer through the process of writing a thesis. This was not an emotionally driven decision; I had consulted my superiors at my internship firm and they said it really did not matter career-wise whether I got the highest class of Honours or the one just below.

It turned out that in the end, this tough choice to sacrifice the glory of an Honours with Highest Distinction became moot. The pandemic and the accompanying social distancing measures caused students to face great difficulties when conducting their research. Recognising this, the Faculty waived the thesis requirement for obtaining the Honours with Highest Distinction class. Students only needed to meet the CAP requirement of at least 4.5.

So that is how I lucked into getting my Honours with Highest Distinction. But as a wise man once said: "Luck is when being prepared meets opportunity". My consistent performance through the seven semesters enabled me to maintain a very high CAP that allowed me to capitalise on the favourable circumstances when they presented themselves.

And for that, I make no apologies for saying that I am immensely pleased with myself.

So yeah, now I have a top-class degree from a very reputable university to wave around when I get into stupid fights with strangers on social media. Suck it!

I can't think of a better way to use this hallowed piece of parchment.

The ramble ends here

Okay, this post became way longer than I intended. Mad respect to you if you made it to this point. You must be really interested in the nitty-gritty of my humdrum existence. I appreciate that a lot. It's rare that anyone cares so much about my banal stories.

You might also have noticed that it is now 2021. My bad! Between laziness, procrastination, distractions, real-life goings-on, and writer's block, the process of writing this post dragged on over weeks instead of the few days I had originally anticipated.

Anyway, if you are one of the elite few who have read this whole post to the end, congratulations and thank you once again for the support! You can finally be free now to go do better things with your time.

Reviving my alma mater

During last year's National Day Rally, the Prime Minister announced the formation of the National Institute of Early Childhood Development (NIEC), which will take charge of training teachers for the preschool sector.

Unfortunately for my old school, the School of Humanities and Social Sciences at Temasek Polytechnic, this means the diploma programme in Early Childhood Studies it currently operates will likely be shut down once the NIEC is up and running.

This will leave it with only two diploma courses, in Psychology Studies and Gerontological Management Studies.

It's going to be difficult to justify having a school with only two diploma courses, so the school's management needs to act quickly to start new programmes if the school is to survive.

I thought it'd be fun to think of some possible diplomas they could introduce, and came up with the list below.

Diploma in Heritage Studies

The school is called Humanities and Social Sciences but there's nothing particularly "humanities" about it. This new diploma, the first of its kind offered by a local polytechnic, will fill that gap, providing a more traditional "arts" option for students who like that sort of thing. It's also industry-relevant as graduates can work in museums, tour agencies, research, and public service. Opportunities for further education are readily available both locally, such as in the National University of Singapore's (NUS) History department, as well as overseas.

Diploma in Social Work

Career prospects for graduates from this course will be fantastic as Singapore is facing and will continue to face a manpower crunch in the field of social work. The only other polytechnic that offers this at the moment is Nanyang Polytechnic so demand from secondary school leavers should be sufficient to fill up the places in the new diploma. Further studies can be done at the NUS Department of Social Work, or at the various private and overseas institutions.

Diploma in Music Studies

The Yong Siew Toh Conservatory at NUS is the natural progression pathway for graduates from this diploma and advanced standing can be arranged between the two institutions. Graduates can also choose to go to the National Institute of Education and train to become music teachers instead. Alternatively, they can enter various jobs such as enrichment providers and media production.

Whatever the new diploma may be, I hope one is launched soon, so that my alma mater won't cease to exist!

Course restructuring: Amputating psychology

Not my finest title for a post but whatever.

I was disturbed when I discovered that Temasek Poly overhauled its curriculum recently and made a lot of changes to the psychology programme I came from that I don't agree with.

With a misty look in my eye, I say, "It was better during my time."

When I was there, we had a requirement called Cross-Disciplinary Subjects (CDS) in which we had to take three modules which were unrelated to our diploma. In NUS, we have something similar known as Unrestricted Electives.

Apparently, CDS is no more. It has been replaced by a strengthened TP Fundamentals component. We had this Fundamentals bit too, but it wasn't called Fundamentals then. It was known as TP Core.

Semantics, semantics.

Last time, TP Core taught us things like public speaking, academic writing, and professional communication skills. And we had the dreaded Leadership: Essential Attributes and Practice (LEAP) levels one through three, of course.

But now, they have all these shiny new modules such as Career Readiness (hey, Roots & Wings!), which is split into three separate modules numbered one through three just like LEAP, Innovation & Entrepreneurship, Persuasive Communication (I wonder if they cover Pathos, Ethos, and Logos...), Communication & Information Literacy (fake news?), Sports & Wellness, Current Issues & Critical Thinking, and Global Studies.

And students have to choose one of three modules with these highfalutin names: Managing Diversity at Work, Global Citizenship & Community Development, or Expressions of Culture. (Shoutout to States Times Review, who may want to turn this into a story with the headline: "Polytechnic Brainwashing Students into Accepting Influx of Foreigners".)

By getting rid of CDS, the institution has severely hampered students' freedom to explore areas that they have interest in. Previously, we could select which CDS we wanted to take, so we would generally go for things that we felt we might like. That was how I first got to study English phonetics, which helped me a lot when I took a basic English module in NUS.

Now, students have very little choice. Everything in TP Fundamentals is fixed except for the decision on which of the highfalutin "cultural" modules I mentioned above to opt for.

Coming from a university and faculty system which gives me so much leeway to "build my own degree", such restrictiveness is anathema to me.

At least there's still LEAP, which is probably the most useful module in the entire Singapore tertiary education system. ( ͡° ͜ʖ ͡°)

But what really shocked me was the total deletion of the subject Physiological Psychology from the Diploma Core part of the psychology programme.

Although I don't major in Psychology in NUS, I know for a fact that psychology majors must complete the following Essential modules: Biological Psychology, Social Psychology, Cognitive Psychology, Developmental Psychology, and Abnormal Psychology. These represent the five pillars of psychology upon which the whole discipline rests.

So to remove Physiological Psychology (another name for Biological Psychology) from the syllabus is like cutting off one of the legs that psychology stands on, hence the title of this post.

The problem with biological psychology is that it's a bitter pill: you suffer a lot when you have to study it because of all the memorising involved in remembering the names and functions of the various structures in the brain and nervous system, but in the long term it benefits you greatly because you know many facts and understand stuff about the human body that most people will never even imagine. When I did the basic Psychology module in NUS, I sure was glad for having taken Physiological Psychology before!

I think future cohorts of students graduating from the psychology diploma will be poorer for this, because it means they won't have as much of a headstart in their psychology degree courses compared to their peers from junior college or other diploma programmes.

To make matters worse, Abnormal Psychology, another of psychology's "legs", was made a Diploma Elective where it was previously a Diploma Core subject. This means that only students who choose to study it will take the module.

I'm struggling to comprehend it! When there's justification to make things compulsory, they make it optional. But in other parts of the programme like TP Fundamentals, they are so heavy-handed in dictating what students should take.

Couldn't they have left well enough alone? Haven't they heard the saying "If it ain't broke, don't fix it"?

The Diploma in Psychology Studies at Temasek Polytechnic

What is psychology?

A lot of people have misconceived notions of what psychology actually is. Some think it's about lying down on a couch and talking non-stop. Others get paranoid about psychologists being able to read minds or judge personality just by looking. I only wish that were true. Psychologists would be superheroes!

The most common assumption is that psychology is the discipline that deals with the diagnosis and treatment of mental illnesses like depression and schizophrenia. However, this isn't entirely true. One branch of psychology, called abnormal psychology or clinical psychology, does train psychologists who help patients suffering from those types of disorders. Counselling psychology also produces therapists who can guide you through rough patches in life, like breakups or exam stress. But psychology is so much more than that.

My favourite area in psychology is industrial-organisational psychology. I/O psychologists are like consultants, helping companies to improve their work processes so that they can get the best out of their employees. For example, I/O psychologists may recommend changes to the compensation and benefits structure, or design new learning and development programmes to optimise the job performance of the workers.

Regardless of what branch of psychology you are referring to, all of them share one important principle: empiricism. In other words, everything that psychologists do must be backed up by research evidence. Don't be fooled! Psychology is often found in arts or humanities schools, but it is actually as scientific as the real hard sciences like chemistry or biology in terms of approach.

Psychology @ TP

This explains the rigorous training in research methods and statistics that forms the backbone of the psychology course at TP. One of the key selling points of the course is that by the end of your three-year stint, you would have completed three full-scale research projects, working in teams of four to six and with guidance from the lecturers. This is excellent experience to take into university-level psychology studies, which are research-intensive.

The TP website tells you more about the course and so on. But since I just graduated from it, let me give you my personal take, for those of you who are thinking of applying for the course.

A word of caution

Think about:

• How good are you with numbers? We use calculators and computer software to crunch data, but you will still need to spend hours staring at walls of data. If you absolutely hate maths or your head spins when trying to process stats, beware!
• Do you despise reading? Part of research involves reading work done by other scientists. These are published as articles in journals like Psychological Science. They are often very long and filled with complex sentences. If you don't like the sound of that, reconsider your options!
• Why do you want to study psychology? Make sure you know what you're going in for. Perhaps you are kind-hearted and want to help people in distress feel better. Counselling or social work would be more directly relevant. Maybe you were inspired by those cop shows on TV. Sure, we do get to pick a couple of electives on criminal psychology, but you'll have to study for a degree (4 years) AND a Masters (2 years) in order to become a forensic psychologist... or any other kind of psychologist, for that matter.

I guess what I'm trying to say is, you need to go in with your eyes open to the realities of psychology studies. We don't learn how to talk someone out of jumping from the top of a HDB block, or track down a psychopathic serial killer using fancy behavioural techniques. Certainly not at diploma level anyway. Maybe after you get your Masters, you might stand a chance against the likes of Ted Bundy. But for now, there's just a lot of sweat and tears (the good news is there isn't any blood) over the computer, slaving away at your next literature review, statistical analysis, or research report. It's unglamourous, exhausting, and at times frustrating.

But wait, surely something positive came out of it...

There sure was! Let's see, where do I even begin...

The three years I spent on it really sharpened my analytical and critical thinking skills, and broadened my worldview. By being exposed to lots of examples of how words (smashed vs. hit) and even numbers can be used to paint a certain picture, I no longer am as gullible as I was before, less likely to take everything at face value. Furthermore, being more aware of mental biases like the availability heuristic has allowed me to improve my own decision-making process, and even critique those of the government (*snickers*)! In cognitive psychology, the availability heuristic states that we often base our impressions on a small handful of examples that come readily to mind. This can result in many erroneous judgments. For example, we can easily recall plenty of incidences where airplane travel went horribly wrong, because such events are widely reported in the news. As such, we might conclude that air travel is extremely dangerous, even though in actual fact, we are statistically less likely to die in an air crash than, say, get killed by a car when crossing the road. In this case, the availability heuristic has caused us to inflate the perceived risk of dying in an aircraft. If we get so scared, we might even choose to avoid travelling by air entirely! Are you (my Singaporean readers) seeing any parallels here with the decision to completely isolate the entire public service from the internet? I'll just leave this here...

It even taught me to be a better person, not to judge people too quickly. In social psychology, there is an effect called the fundamental attribution error. It refers to our tendency to attach greater meaning to others' personality and innate characteristics and underestimate the influence of situational factors. For example, if a guy rushes past and bumps into you on the way to the check-in counter at the airport, you might be tempted to brand him an "impatient @#$%^&". But take a step back and calm down. There are many reasons why he might be behaving this way. Perhaps he is frantically trying to get back to his hometown, where his sick mother lies dying.

A bit more on the subjects

Trust me, you are going to do A LOT of research. Let me make it clear: Google IS NOT research. Research involves the entire process of reading up about a topic, thinking of an extension to the topic that hasn't been explored before, coming up with questions and predictions about your chosen topic, designing a survey or experiment to test your predictions, gathering data from your study, crunching the numbers and making sense of them, and finally reporting your findings so that others can build on them. You will go through this process three times, in Applied Psychology Research Project A (APRP-A), Applied Psychology Research Project B (APRP-B), and Major Project. The difference between APRP-A and APRP-B is that in APRP-A, you will design a survey whereas in APRP-B, you will need to design an experiment where you need to control variables. For Major Project, whether you do a survey or experiment or even exotic types like focus groups and interviews depends on the topic you get.

To be fair, the course is not all about research. It also covers the various branches of psychology, like child and educational, counselling, abnormal, I/O, social, and cognitive psychology. I've already talked a bit about I/O psychology, and given short examples of concepts in social and cognitive psychology. Electives allow you to learn about how psychology is applied to areas like human resource management and special needs education. These subjects are much more interesting and you will be able to easily apply what you have learnt to real life, more so if you manage to secure an internship in a related field. Internships are compulsory and possible placements include teaching aide at Pathlight School for children with autism, research assistant at universities in Australia, and recruitment or other business-oriented activities like what I had.

Assessments are mainly test- and exam-based, with some group projects and individual assignments thrown in. Projects and assignments usually require you to write essays or give a presentation on a topic. Being able and willing to memorise lots of facts is essential if you want to score good grades.

In summary...

I don't regret the three years that I spent on this diploma, as I have gained so much useful knowledge that I otherwise wouldn't have if I had gone to junior college (due to the competitive cut-off, all the students in this diploma are JC-qualified). It has imparted me with skills I will need in the university. Given another chance, I wouldn't change a thing. BUT! I would definitely advise caution to those who are considering the course. BE VERY SURE you know what you're signing up for. Like I said, if you want to become a psychologist, be prepared to read journal articles for the next ten years of your life.

Or you could always take this diploma as a foundation, and switch to another social science discipline like social work or human resource management at degree level. This is a good and viable option as the skills you will learn during the course are transferable to most general courses of study (i.e. not requiring specialised skills like engineering or medicine) in the universities, and there are plenty of choices of relevant university degrees now with the recent opening of SUSS and SIT, in addition to those offered by private institutions.

Personally, I'm probably going to jump over to another area of social science which is more skills-based and "real-world application" in nature. I don't think I want to make a career of psychology. It can be too theoretical at times, and research isn't easy or fun for me and I can't envision myself spending another six years or more of my life doing it just to get two pieces of paper. And I question the job prospects of psychology majors in Singapore, especially for those who stop at the Bachelor degree level like I plan to do. They seem pretty dim to me. Most local employers look for degrees which are related to the job opening. Degrees in human resource management are sought when recruiting for positions in HR, mass comm majors for PR roles, and so on. Since I hope to join the workforce as soon as possible, this is the route I will most likely take.

---DISCLAIMER---
I took the course from 2014 to 2017. This post is based on my experiences from that time. By the time you see this, things may have changed (particularly if you found this post through a Google search)!