I guess I should be studying for the final exam of this exam series. It's Chemistry, something that I'm quite confident of, yet at the same time apprehensive about.

Time should be spent doing other things. Life's too short to be worrying about why P=MC is the allocatively efficient point, how complementary base pairing is made use of in gene techniques, how to integrate arcsinx, why can't I use LiAlH4 to reduce alkenes.

As I go through the system (keeping in mind the fact that I should be bound for a few more years of it in university), I can't help but feel more and more disillusioned with the process.

The process is the key, the best people say. The goals are secondary.

But when the process is so wrong, I'm sad to say that the goals are the only things that keep us going.

Will any of us remember the things we learnt in our education? Smatterings maybe. A little bit here and there, with all of us exclaiming at some point in the future "Oh I learnt that somewhere" with a hazy memory of the long gone past of books and notes deep in the recesses of our minds.

I loved the Chemistry Olympiad. Of course, I was surrounded by individuals that made me feel inadequate and lacking, but only so in knowledge, not as a person. That kind of studying was fun. Grueling, yet still enjoyable. Freedom to study what you want, to understand the concepts because you want to, not because you need to. You could fail and not fall. Failure was encouraged, for it told you how to improve, not how you were lacking.

As I sit with the same mechanisms, the same reagents and conditions that I studied back in the first term while my fellow students slogged away at their CTs, I don't feel that same sense of elation, enjoyment and motivation I did previously. Yes, I admit that studying the same things now fills me with disgust and dread.

The question then is not what, but how.

When the process was so much fun, it sure sucks to go back to H2.