EC3 has been a major part of my life for many years — since I first stepped into Chinese High in 2001, I have been continuously playing some role in it. The club was established in 1980, and has seen plenty of turmoil in its time, going through highs and lows year after year. 1990s was the supposed “prime” period, the age of glory for the club, when club members brought back trophy after trophy, winning competitions nationally and internationally. We had the best talent, and achieved the best results. We were entrepreneurial too, continually experimenting with lots of new things.

In 2001/2 it is commonly accepted that there was a lack of strong leadership, and the batch immediately senior to me was neither extremely talented nor extremely able to lead. This led to a kind of leadership “vacuum”, and under it the club started to stagnate. And then the club rose a little, and started declining again possibly in 2004 or 2005. I’m not too sure.

But now my juniors are starting to ask me what they should do with the club. Those are difficult questions to answer, and really depend on the situation — it must be really difficult to take the reins of the club into your own hands when you are only Sec 3. I took many years to gain some understanding of how the club works, and even then I don’t profess to have a full understanding of how the club works. It has been something that has constantly been on my mind in some form or another for the past six or seven years, and it is indeed a difficult issue. EC3 is entirely student-run, and its programmes are wholly due to the efforts of the students. There is no significant teacher intervention — if there is any, it is purely administrative in nature.

There are always certain “divides” within the club. The more talented members and the less able members tend to segregate themselves, their achievements (or lack of achievements) further pushing them in different directions. Therefore the less talented members sometimes feel less valued by the club — I’m not too sure how this is manifesting itself now. In any case, programming and web development tend to be quite solitary activities; the learning curve is so steep that you have to spend a lot of time learning individually and independently. It is really difficult to make the club members bond together; I believe that is one of the main problems facing the current ex-co now.

Difficult.

“To hold infinity in the palm of your hand,
and eternity in an hour.”

– William Blake, Auguries of Innocence

There are only nine days left to home, and I have a feeling that these nine days will seem like eternity. It’s exactly like cycling from Stanford to the Pacific Ocean — there is no choice but to ride over the insurmountable Skyline mountain range, 2400 feet of hard work. And some of my friends have already reached Singapore! I can’t wait to get on board the Singapore Airlines plane — an SQ flight means that you’re already one step closer to home when you step aboard the plane, just because it is Singapore Airlines.

And this is a photo of me, taken by Ching Hua, at the Marine Headlands: