About Me

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She writes simply to put her thoughts together.
Sometimes they're well-structured, sometimes they're in absolute mess.
But always, they're personal.

Ultimately, this is all for Him.

Saturday 29 October 2016

To Do What You Love and To Love What You Do

Towards the end of my second year at uni, I had resigned to the fact that I would need to learn to work with my most-despised science subject i.e. Chemistry. During A-Level years, I studied hard in that particular subject only for the sake of getting good grades. But then as I get deeper into Physics, I've chosen a path that puts quantum physics into practicality through condensed matter physics, which is much associated with materials science. Since physics is the heart of hard sciences, doing materials science would either mean that you head towards the engineering side of it or its chemistry. My university is known to merge physics with chemistry really well (whilst its engineering department is more towards doing management and business). This therefore pushed me to face the subject that I once declared to be the bane of my life.

Little did I know that that's not my last encounter of such events.

I've strayed away from the science path entirely now, venturing into the corporate world through the lens of an investment company. Whether this change is permanent or temporary to me, only time will tell. All I know is that I have a bond of 4 years to the government to serve and this is how I repay their funding of my tertiary education.

Simply, like how UK was a phase in my life (a good chunk of it), doing management/finance is just another phase to me.

With absolutely zero background in social science, let alone accounting or finance or business or management (unless you consider being housemates with Accounting and Finance students as an exception), I am most definitely learning things from scratch again. Resonating what I said in my job interview, I am always up for the pursuit of knowledge. The challenge that it poses is an interesting prospect but it still doesn't negate the fact that the outlook can be quite daunting. What with my open declaration I repetitively made, of that I would never ever consider opening up a business (cause I know I would suck badly at it), I've always steered away when people do business talks around me. Yes I like knowledge, but never in my slightest mind that that knowledge would be something that I have been passionately dislike.

I guess I never learned my lesson to never say never.

After four weeks into my current job, the experience is never short of overwhelm with the spice of constantly feeling stupid. Trust me when I said that the past 4 weeks felt like 4 months (my colleague when to the extent of saying it felt like 4 years.lol). Time and time again I felt like quitting and asked myself "what on earth am I doing here". I've sworn my life to not get into the corporate life that I've even paved my path to become a proper scientist. But we can only plan. Post-graduation, given all the choices that was laid out in front of me, I decided that this would be the best for now.

As one of the few graduate trainees hired, I would have to attend an on-job classroom training for one week every month. A good time off from the hectic office environment I would say. But that's not all to it. The training consists of academic modules in - guess what - ACCOUNTING. Tipulah kalau langsung tak terbit rasa "why does this always happen to me" T.T

I couldn't handle it at first. Most - if not all - of what the teacher/trainer was teaching went straight over my head. Part of me simply could not fathom what was taught, part of me refused to even make an effort to. Selama ni tak pernah amek kisah langsung apa kengkawan aku belajar T.T . But I was left with no choice. Our performance would consistently be measured throughout the training. With case studies and homework and presentation and exam, I cannot afford to remain clueless throughout.

It was hard.

The first day was all about battling myself. I gave up before the class even started. In class, all I did was stared blankly at the teacher. When assignments were given to us, I was beyond uncomfortable. Good thing the teacher was really understanding and encouraging. Once I manged to control my emotions and submit to what I had to face, positivity kept coming in. I realised that in the hardships that I had to endure, I made friends - a support group in fact. In the midst of my being clueless, I actually learned the subject along the way (besides the fact that the module structure is excellent and the teacher is beyond amazing). Now I can look at a financial statement and able to run all the possible analysis to determine how good a business is doing. Haha.

Looking back, the process was actually fun.

An overlook of the class. In total, there's 13 of us in our graduate trainee cohort.
11 in the Investments, 2 in Strategic Management.

And that, my friend, is the beauty of berlapang dada (no, I couldn't find the right english word to use haha). I'm sure everyone wants to be happy. Some of us are even in the pursuit of happiness. But life won't always be on our side. It's meant to be hard - even the Quran says so. It would grind us to the ground, it would squeeze us to pulp. Sometimes we just have to come to terms with it in order for us to enjoy living. And that would sometimes mean loving the things that we have no choice of doing. But in order to achieve the love to the point of enjoying what we do, it requires hard work. Tremendous amount of effort needs to be put in. Like they said, "love" is a verb, not a noun. It's something that you need to work on, not something that simply exists.

It's still a roller coaster ride for me. Sometimes I get to achieve that enjoyment in my work, sometimes I would fall back to the point where I hate my work. Going back and forth of the two extremes is definitely tiring. But humans are adaptive. If we persevere long enough, I'm sure before I know it, it's going to be a hard goodbye.

But then again, there's always that sort of things that you love easily, with no minimal effort needed. Good thing the one lifetime commitment I recently made requires little to no effort to attain the highest level of love and satisfaction ;)