Everyone is your competitor

Being an honours student ain't easy.

Especially when you are constantly surrounded by geniuses with full scores.

If you are not familiar with the local university academic system, here is a brief crash course about the honours year a.k.a the fourth and final year. In most of the courses in NUS, honours students are required to maintain a certain grade (we call it the CAP score, which is equivalent to GPA), to graduate with a bachelor's degree with honours, instead of the usual bachelor's degree if you graduate in three years.

As a RESULT, those with better scores mostly carry onto the fourth year. There are some who do qualify for the final year but choose not to do so for some other reasons. All in all, honours students are generally very smart, except for me (an average student) because i'm just plain lucky to do comparatively better in the recent semesters.

One of my friends in the honours batch recently gave me her golden nugget of advice:  everyone in this hall you are looking at is your competitor.

Although i don't feel that everyone looks ready to bite each other's heads off, there are some who do come across as pretty serious and aggressive at some point. Saying that i'm extremely stressed is just half the truth. In fact, i'm terrified that i won't be able to do well this year which may compromise my plans on my future studies.

As much as i know that i need to loosen up and quit being too uptight about everything, i can't shake off the gnawing feeling that i might just be booted out of the race even before it has ended.

Okay, it's time to hit the books again.