What seemed like 5 days for the participants is actually more than months of preparations for the facilitators, hence I think doing a long reflection about what I experienced during ISYF would be necessary.
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1. Identity
Just for clarification, I am part of the SRC activity comm, which is mainly in charge of SRC activities, school tour and cultural hour. I would say that we did a pretty good job for ISYF. Despite some problems faced during the preparation period (not being able to find ideas, wood turns to plastic), I think there's no problem at all during the actual day of SRC activity. Actually I'm still very surprised how in the world could the reaction with luminol could create such a 'wow' from the participants; personally I thought my experiments were pretty boring.. I suppose our purpose of making the experiments fun for the participants have succeeded, so that's something to be happy about.
For school tour, there's seriously not enough time for teams to finish touring all the planned locations in one hour before going for nobel masterclass. For my route I've covered pretty much everything apart from the library and the canteen (which is actually unnecessary). Based on observation I think my group members are not really interested in school tour as much as other stuff (especially the nobel masterclass that follows) so skipping a few venues would be ok.
Cultural hour is on time most of the time, except for the last cultural hour where one school have to be moved to a later time (which is actually ok because there's a gigantic buffer time for that). It's quite interesting getting to know the cultural backgrounds of the different participants, although I suspect a wikipedia tour would pretty much give the same things.
Also, I'm one of the group leaders for Gemma (wooots). It's an awesome group, with very high people, very talkative people, very photoloving people, very phototaking people. It's a wonderful experience to be in the group leader of Gemma together with Jeya, the members are all very cooperative, and high at the correct times. The only bad thing is that my group was somehow invisible to other groups' eyes because we've never gotten bombed before. (Dam lol when the bomb goes from one group to another and back again and we were just standing there and stoning)
Other than being part of SRC activity comm, I became the member of the unofficial saikang warrior comm (with rayray being chairman and johnny being vice-chairman) It's actually fun to do all the saikang throughout the day, running from one place to another, carry stuff, doing other comm's activities. It gets me exposed to many new things (such as using a real camera to take photos after such a long time), and meet a lot of different people, to the extend that some might thought that I belong to another comm when I'm not (admins lololol), or that I know the schedule more than other normal facilitators (more like cus of the ray yan aura). The funny thing is that I was the carpark usher and the door holder for ISYF, so basically I'm the one who get to meet all the VIPs and guests (barring nobel laureates) before anyone else. Ironic seeing that I'm a foreigner by law :P
The thing about ISYF is that every facilitator is expected to be able to do another facilitator's work if he / she was too busy to do it. But in the end it still went down to a few people doing most of the saikang work (maybe he will talk about it later) and having almost everyone (that includes participants) throwing all the problems they face at these few people. (lol boarding school shower got problem) The only good thing is that you get to do a lot of things / rubbish and get to know more things than anyone else.
2. Fails
3. Gains
These 5 days had been a learning journey for me. For myself, I learnt how to plan experiments properly with a lot of restrictions provided (now thinking of it I think those restrictions are important, seeing how participants have major SPA fail despite my instructions on the screen), to get all the materials prepared beforehand and double-check it with the lab tech (I should have prepared them myself but Mdm Xia was very kind and prepared all the solutions for me :/)
Other than that, I get to enjoy the life of a saikang warrior, get to crash E2/01 every night to hear jokes and be a joke, get to lead a group (rather successfully), get to eat more hotel food than normal people can (ninjaing vegetable and halal table), get to know part of the whole infrastructure of the ISYF committee instead of only knowing my own comm's stuff, get to hear people's problems, get to be a gentleman-in-waiting, get to learn how to dance Gee, get to enjoy air-con rooms everyday.
It's one of those events which I would never forget.
4. Random trivia
This section is for abstract trivia that happened during ISYF. Since it's random, it's trivia, and it's abstract, hence it comes in bits and pieces.
Some may wonder how I manage to stay alive and hale and hearty during the 8 days (remember that we already stayed in boarding school on 13 Jan), my hypothesis has been proven correct: hugs, jokes, walking around, milo. Although I may add in another variable known as 人品 because seriously, I faced almost no problems at all.
While many people seemed to be very stressed and down as the days go by, I have always been in the 0 stress mode throughout the ISYF period. To be honest, I felt no sense of urgency / anxiety / pressure at all for ISYF. If you thought there were times I seemed to express those feelings, then I suppose it's cus I'm acting (subconsciously). One good thing about running around is that you have the chance to escape from random rubbish at your original location, but of course you may run into rubbish on the way but that depends on your 人品 already.
Despite each day being a long day, it's soothing to be able to grab instances to exchange a few words with close friends, laugh at jokers and jokes, wink and cough when something that contains 'private information which only we know' is brought up, and of course, contact. I can say it is very addictive, especially when the other one doesn't mind.
I took 2 days to learn how to dance Gee, which I performed during cultural hour and dinner & dance. My already negative reputation would have gone even more negative by now. But that's ok, because I don't really care about reputations of stereotypical guys or things like that. (although man pride is important) I conclude by saying that Gee is all about shaking your butt and acting cute, which of course with me doing it left many people emotionally and mentally scarred for life. oops.
禁术-友谊锁链. Made quite a lot of friends during ISYF, especially among the facilitators. Commitment wise I would have to see first, shall talk about it some other time.
5. Conclusion
All in all, ISYF was a great success, and I had many new experiences being a facilitator, which mainly came from my running around as the saikang warrior in training. It gave me plenty of exposure to both the outside world (participants) and inside world (committee). Would miss the feeling of organising such an event.
Group Gemma! (mafia style)
SRC Comm!
Random guy facils lolol
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