So this week’s been pretty up and down for me with moving to a new environment, starting school in RMIT and pretty much just settling down. It’s never easy leaving almost everything behind at home and living in a new place (somewhere that I have never set foot on before), what’s more, starting on a new education journey having been on a hiatus for the past 3 years due to serving National Service back home on sunny island Singapore. What’s having class on a Monday morning, 9.30am, compared to something on a different scale of settling student admin matters, adapting to a new environment, meeting new people, and at the same time thinking about home?

An article was issued in class on Monday during the very first lectorial for Media 1. It was a lengthy one, and to be honest, I’m not that much of a reader, therefore didn’t really paid much attention to reading it, just skimmed my way through. Until the class started getting more in depth about it, questions were raised during the “post-reading discussion”, I realised how much people do read into the article, analysing, breaking down information, fact checking, all within the short period of 10 – 15 minutes. And how comfortable they are, in expressing their views. Kind of shocked at first, but I guess that’s normal here? From where I’m from, students usually do the listening and lecturers would do most of the talking and there isn’t many questions during the lecture. Even when the lecturer asks for any opinions, answers, or questions, majority of the students would just shy away and just keep their queries to the end of lecture. Personally, I find it a little intimidating with everyone’s confidence in expressing their thoughts and feelings towards a certain matter, and that’s probably where I might have to improve on myself to present and speak up when needed.

Hyper Attention or Deep Attention? I guess there is no definite “side” to choose. I believe that it really depends on the situation that you are in and the environment that cultivates the behaviour of an individual. For example, in the 4 stages of competence where it illustrates a learning curve. Everybody starts off at unconscious incompetence, where I would assume requires more of deep attention in order to focus on the new skill that you might have picked up and develop a certain kind of muscle memory or flow and rhythm. Slowly moving up the stages, achieving unconscious competence where it becomes almost second nature and that’s hyper attention kicks in, hence being able to multitask. A good example would be learning to drive, initially we feel nervous, anxious and uncertain at first, paying full attention to so many things at once (especially if you’re driving a manual transmission). However, as we get more experience, we tend to get more confident being in the driver’s seat and start doing other things outside of just driving from point A to B. We engage in conversations with our passengers, listening to music, eating, and more.

To put all that I have mentioned into context, I’m pretty much at the stage of “unconscious incompetence” from the start of my trip to Melbourne and starting school at RMIT. Too many worrying uncertainties, too many “what ifs”, basically just trying to keep my head above the water. I just can’t wait to shift into overdrive to achieve unconscious competence, where I can just find my place to fit in and proceed to doing many other things all at once.