listening to the sound of silence

Sometimes I wonder, when people look at me, do they see the same person that I see when look into a mirror?

Mirror, mirror on the wall, who is that person I see?

I'm having a very light week. I don't have any classes tomorrow, and on other days, I have no more than 2 hours of class. I guess this is what they call the silence/calm before the storm. And what a storm next week will be. More like a hurricane to me. 10 papers in a row. 2 papers per day for 5 days with 2 Laws and an Economics papers in three consecutive days. The thing is, at least in a storm, you have the eye of the storm where everything calms down for a while, there is no eye in this storm.

NEWSFLASH!
We might be able to continue our studies until Masters/Ecole de Commerce/BAC+ 5. Sylvie emailed everyone telling that PETRONAS is apparently not against the idea of letting us continue our studies after our bachelor programme. That is so predictable of them.

I guess it's a good thing that now we have a choice between continuing our studies or stopping at BAC+ 3 and pack our bags. But at the end of the day, we have to ask ourselves, do we want to do it, do we need to do it, and is it worth doing?

The good thing about stopping at BAC+ 3 is that, you'll get a degree equivalent to a bachelor's degree, you go back home to Malaysia, and start working with Petronas at the age of 20 (in my case of course. I'll graduate two months before my 21st birthday). From there, you can do part-time studies, doing ACCA or CPA or whatever. The bad thing is, some of us have the potential of continuing our studies in a Grande Ecole or doing Masters, which is not easy, even for the French. It's sad to see it go to waste.

The good thing about continuing until BAC+ 5 is that, you'll get a degree equivalent to a Master's degree, you'd have already begun building your network of contacts with the people in the French business sphere, and your degree is widely recognized in France. BUT (a very big but), in Malaysia, you still wouldn't know if your Masters is recognised as it is, or simply as an equivalent to a Bachelor's degree (which is still the case with other Malaysian engineering students in France ). Then, to become a certified accountant, you'd still need to complete your ACCA or CPA, which may be quite hard since you're too used to the French system that the English system might look Greek to you (it's an expression; it's all Greek to me!).

But hey! I'm not the expert. I'll need to ask my Accountings teachers and my accountant brother, to see what they have to say about this.