"You Must Have Studied Very Hard!"

I received another issue of Western's alumni magazine today. Usually, I would scan a few pages, half read the rather similar articles, pay not much attention before sending it to the garbage bin. Tonight, I actually read a few articles. I liked one of them. I guess deeply personal and honest articles are easy to read and appreciate.

Then, I tried to find news about the computer science department. I was not surprised when I could not find any. I knew the department did not have a high profile at the university.

Feeling nostalgic for some reason, I started surfing the net looking for familiar names. I was not really seriously looking for anything, just searching for this name, that name.

I spent eleven years at Western. The four years of undergraduate studies were the most interesting years. You see, I did not know much about English; I did not speak the language; I could read a little; everything was not always comprehensible. How I ever graduated with that amount of English is still rather amazing to me. It was really like living in a permanent thick fog, nothing was ever quite clear.

Other students left me alone, with the exception of my fellow foreign students. Actually, the department left all the foreign students alone. We were never active members of the class, basically being tolerated rather than embraced. I did not feel bitter about it, and I still don't. Being different has never been an endearing characteristics in any community.

There is an amusing episode though, showing the stereotype we projected to the rest of the department. It was in my third year. I was taking a course on microprocessors. I scored the highest mark in the mid-term. I guess it was totally unexpected by the instructor. Not sure about the reason. One day, I went to see the instructor for an unrelated reason, he asked for my name, heard it, and remarked that I had the highest mark for that examination. I nodded my head, not paying much attention to that remark. He then remarked that I must have studied very hard for it. I have no idea what my expression was, but I was thinking that I did not study very much. I was actually quite worried that the examination would be another memorization contest. It was to the instructor's credit that it surely was not.

As usual, the final examination was much less interesting. Interesting examinations have the tendency of failing a lot of students. Of course, the problem with uninteresting examinations is that it is difficult to differentiate students who know what they are studying and students who don't. But then who says examinations have any purpose other than providing marks to students?