Unofficial Guide to the new term

Our NTU handbook does not have a student's unofficial guide to the new term, and we propose that our survivor guide should be added into the handbook for academic year 2011/12 and beyond :)

1. managing time -
Time, being an important part of our school life. effective time management allows us to be able to manage projects, assignements and deadlines, and able to lead a life (and not be a no life mugger) and of course, club once in a while :)

Secret for having more time:
 时间就像乳沟, 挤一挤就有
(Time is just like cleavage, as long as you squeeze it, you'll get it)

 no no, we don't mean butt clevage

2. Managing lectures, seminars and tutorials
Multitasking, is an important skill in student life. It allows you to pick up knowledge, and at the same time maintain sanity during boring lectures, and not watch your toe nails grow.

We believe that multi-tasking works effectively when u are juggling a boring job with a creative/fun task. Especially when u are in class, you have the boring side of the equation worked out. So now you need a creative task. Something like tweeting (like maintaining this @therealfakeNTU account) , day trading, facebooking, blogging. anything!


But of course, don't try two boring tasks at the same time: like listening to a lecture and reading economics. your brain will send messages to your eyelids to shutdown within minutes.

Conversely, don't try to juggle two creative/fun tasks at the same time. Don't believe me? try knitting and pole dancing at the same time.

This is okay- 

These are not.

class participation
the silly things which students do, just for the sake of marks. but, do not:

use vigorous head hodding to simulate comprehension

For goodness sake, you aren't a bobbing toy on my car dashboard.

speaking the obvious

• Instead of running the experiement for 4 weeks, would the outcome be any different if you ran the experiment for 28 days? 

•  I agree that we need customers for a business to be profitable. 

• Trying to power up Solar powered electrical devices would ultimately fail approximately 50% of the time, because the sky is dark from 7pm to 7am. 

Attacking presentation mates

• Can you run the entire revenue forecast again, on a 20%, 30% and 50% reduction in each budget for marketing, recruitment and sales?  

• I know u used π = 3.14159 to derive the answer, but how much does it deviate from the actual answer, if u used  π accurate to 100 decimal points instead? 

• If the earth rotated 10km closer to the sun in the orbit, could you run an experiment to show that we could still see the stars at night?  

• I'm correct because I'm smarter than you. I'm smarter than you because I'm correct. 

3. projects & presentations -
ahh the bane of school life.

Plagiarism
plagiarism is ok. Eg, if you are going to steal your neighbour's car, at least make sure you have the decency to change the number plate, and give it a new spray paint, before you drive it in front of your neighbour.

(And if he has a habit of keeping condoms in the glove compartment, for goodnesssake, remove them and keep them somewhere else instead)


How to plagiarize:
Original article: For example, people may tend to act in a manner that has a consequential effect of maximizing self interest

Your version: People love money.

There you go. that was simple.


Fluffing up presentations:

"We began our project with an immerse mediation, to get in line with out spiritual self, and a journey of self discovery. Our project initiatives were then acted out according to the variable methodology described at our strategic directional pre-consensus framework, in which we hope to explore new paradigms and evangelize the findings."

There you go. This paragraph can be included in any report you have to do, be it chemical engineering, big bang theory, Apple's marketing strategy, nuclear fissure, whether PAP will lose a GRC in GE2011, anything.



Reducing word count

whats the difference in word count between these two samples?
___________________________________________________________________________________
Sample A


However, it was found that distributive justice was of no impact to organizational commitment (Jamaludin, 2008). Also, another study conducted by Moorman (1991) showed that only interactional justice was related to organizational citizenship behavior. This was accrued to the differences between interactional justice and formal procedures and in differences between procedural justice in general and distributive justice. It was also hypothesized and proven that there exists a causal relationship between procedural and distributive justice.
___________________________________________________________________________________

      Sample B

___________________________________________________________________________________

Answer: Sample A is 74 words, Sample B is 0 words. (PS Sample B is a JPEG image. don't say we taught you)



4.Career advice
For those going on internships/graduate students going out to the working world, here's a MCQ for you.

If you work hard on your new job/internship. you'd be rewarded with:
1) A huge year end bonus
2) Employee recognition award/promotion
3) More work

So now you know what to do.



5. Lastly, follow us on twitter, and tell your friends!

http://twitter.com/#!/therealfakeNTU