College Life In One Day – A Levels in a Nutshell

Notice the extra bunch of students on this one particular day? Notice the awkwardness, the excitement, of this extra bunch of students? That particular day was what you might have called Taylor ’s College Life In One Day (CLIOD), an event that Taylor ’s College Sri Hartamas had organized on the 2nd of June 2009.

Specially designed to promote enrolment into the A-Levels program at Taylor’s, this event proved to be beneficial for many hungry 17 year-old college-hunters. This way, they can actually experience life in Taylor’s itself before making a wary decision to come.

On that eventful day, many interesting segments of college life were exposed to the young adults with scrumptious titles like Candy Chromatography, Landing on the Moon?! and CSI Investigation. Stepping into the intellectual glass-walled classroom 2.12, one would see Mr Gan, our very own Thinking Skills teacher, introducing the participants to the compulsory Thinking Skills subject. Seeing as many students are still wary of the critical thinking subject’s purpose, this segment is important for the hopefuls to grasp the essentiality of it. I hereby claim the fact that Mr Gan had definitely left an impactful purpose in the participants towards Thinking Skills when he told them the horrendous, if not embarrassing story of the engineer who lacked common sense.

Then at Discovery Lab 2 there was ‘Candy Chromatography,’ which is actually a fancy name designated to introduce a chemistry activity. The candy-themed class was conducted by Ms Leong, who instructed the participants to extract the dye from Smarties chocolates and determine their relative solubilities using chromatography paper.

The biology activity, ‘CSI Investigation’, was conducted by Ms Charmaine Khoo in the Discovery Labs. The participants were given three different urine samples and asked to determine which contained glucose. An imaginary scenario was given in which a murder was committed. The murderer was male, diabetic and had Huntingdon’s disease. The role-play investigators’ job was to determine which urine sample belonged to the murderer. They were also taken to the I-Zone to view the Koshland Science Museum website, to learn about the Combined DNA Index System (CODIS) that is used to test a person’s DNA fingerprint. Too forensic-like? Hence the title ‘CSI Investigation’!

If there is a biology simulation and a chemistry delicacy program, then “Landing on the Moon” was the specially designed physics activity. It was conducted in the I-Zone, where the participants played a computer game. They were asked to apply Newton’s Third Law while landing on the virtual moon. Hmm. Physics in application of our computeristic daily life? Who wouldn’t find college interesting!

But the highlight of the day was definitely the ‘Explorace’ at the end of the day, a game in which participants must explore Taylor’s College in order to answer questions about it as quickly as possible. Questions included “What is the name of the staffroom?” The keen, and not to mention flustered participants rushed to check out the information on the rooms, and from the students and staff of Taylor’s College. At the end of the day, they were already familiar with the college grounds even before being official college-goers!

It is definitely a worthwhile experience to be exposed to real life situations at an early stage so that one can have ample time to think about a suitable choice of career. A Form 5 student, Zafira commented: “It was a very fun experience. I’ve never done anything like this before in high school.” Chuah Li Quen and Kit Yee from SM Sri Sentosa remarked that the activities had allowed them to experience college life and do experiments individually unlike those in high school, which are performed in groups. After all that has been said and done, grabbing an opportunity like this to step into a day at Taylor’s College Sri Hartamas is a great way to heat oneself up for life after high school!

By ADIBAH MN and CLAIRE WONG | Photos by KAY WHA and HAU YON