Hiatus For A Reason

Hi Everybody,

So sorry for not having written anything for such a long time. I have, for the past few days been caught up with a bad neck strain, followed by a severe bout of food poisoning and am now being troubled by pain in the sinuses.

Looking further back, my time was occupied by the closing stages of the trial at the Ministry of Manpower which I spoke about earlier. This was my co-counsel and I (remember the picture of us in safety helmets) in battle garb...



The trial lasted a total of 4 days, for which I am proud that I only cross-examined for 4 hours, the rest of the time being taken up by my long-winded opponent.

A mistake most lay-people make with trials nowadays, however, is to think that once the Court hearing is over, most of what has to be done has been done and all one needs to do is to wait for the verdict. That cannot be further from the truth as almost all trials of any complexity entail written (often lengthy) submissions. It took me a month, during which my co-counsel was conspicuous by his absence, citing other work demands as a reason for his non-participation, to complete the Submissions, which ran to 74 pages. I then took another week to complete the Reply to my opponent's submissions. Somehow, I still get the feeling we'll lose because the case law seens against us but we will see...



The rest of the time was spent with my friend preparing our MBA applications - filling in detailed forms, procuring referee reports and perhaps, most tiring of all, writing essays about all manner of topics. As we applied for 3 universities, I think I wrote close to 20-odd essays as well as prepared a two minute video introduction of myself. And then there were the interviews, for which we had to take leave and dress up and go to places which we last frequented close to a decade ago (the universities)...

I am pleased to say that we were both offered places by both Nanyang Technological University (NTU) and the National University of Singapore (NUS). Which in a way makes for a very painful dilemma - which university do we go to? NUS is ranked higher in the latest Financial Times rankings, seems to have the more rigorous syllabus and is offering us a $5,000 Alumni Bonus for we had completed our undergraduate degrees there. NTU on the other hand seems to have a more flexible schedule, appears to provide more travel opportunities for Business Missions or short exchange programmes and has more weekend classes, which really does matter because it means less rushing from work to make classes which start shortly after 6pm (NUS's starts at 6pm, NTU's at 6:15pm - ie. you have to beg your boss to let you leave early). To that end, NTU has the more accessible study premises at OneNorth at Buona Vista as opposed to Kent Ridge for NUS.

Tough choices, which we have debated and vacillated upon for a long time. But time is running short. Anybody has any ideas or advice?