All-A(cademic)

Assalamualaikum,

Peace be upon you.

Do you know there's actually an active Malaysian student organization over here? Affectionately known as PPMC; I'm one of the committee members, assigned to manage the Academic Bureau, together with another colleague - Faiz Kadir.

Oh well.

Personally, this whole "student body" thing ain't a new thing to me. And I've to say PPMC is no different than other student-based organization in terms of its primary target or concern. What do you expect of a student body attempting to cater for a group of students of the same nationality, living in a foreign land?

Barely five months since I had been chosen to uphold this responsibility, the question of "Why am I doing this?" has always been a constant companion. The answer resides with me and me alone, but I attempted to channel its impact on the "Unit" I'm assigned to - Academic. You wanna know what I think I'm supposed to do? To make sure no Malaysian students (let it be 1st, 2nd, 3rd, 4th or final years) in UCC flunk in his/her exams or I'm a dead meat, answering off questions in Annual Grand Meeting with lame excuses.

Haha of course... not. How on earth am I supposed to do that? I'm not the one entering the exam hall for any of them, nor I'm the one getting out of the bed early in the morning to study or whatever. And I'm not gonna do any of these two just to look good on AGM day.

You wanna know what I really wanna do?

In all honesty, and I know Allah the Almighty is with me in this - I want to help in creating an environment where knowledge is constantly being sought after, shared and taught among its members.

There's a few ways I know I can do to achieve this.. but not everything. How can such an environment exist when its members need to continuously being told what to do? I, am also part of the system.. and all I can say is "Spoon-feeding" is a double-ended blade in a culture - grazes deep underneath the skin.

Indeed.. the responsibility to plan, to generate, and to carry out programmes lie entirely on my shoulder. That's my job and I'm obliged to fulfill it accordingly. I have half a year to do what I should do, not without flaws on my part, but with utter conviction that things can get better.

So far, the support and response I'm getting are generally positive. As I have to cater for the seniors in UCC as well and not just my batch, I received enormous amount of help from a few of those seniors and also from working doctors. That explains a bit.. age and experience play a huge part.

Dependency.. sooner or later one has to grow out of it. Search, Go, Start, DO.

One thing I can tell about this community is their persistence, once they get things started. And that, is something I won't give up in.

Should start somewhere anyway, eh?