of everybody I know, who came from singapore to study here, I think I'm the only one that chose to stay. Of course, I'm the only one who had the choice to stay not being on scholarship, but lately I've been thinking that maybe that was a good thing after all... a very good thing.

Over cny, my mum found out that nobody she knew in Singapore was happy in their job. Not one of my cousins, not one of her friends' children. Suddenly, she decided to stop pressuring me to come home.

As tiring as my job is (the 2am nights are likely to continue again soon), it is also among other things, challenging, interesting and above all, fulfilling. In addition, it's a pleasure working with other people who feel the same way about the job because you can rely on them to do the best they can and to get things done. In contrast, I think if I were to go home to work, I'd feel stuck and be surrounded by many people feeling the same way.

Not to disparage many of the scholars who have gone home, (some of them are happy where they are), but I think I got the better deal here. Sure I have a bunch of debt and sure I may be far away from many of the people I care about and who care about me, but in exchange, the job I spend 50-70 out of 112 or so waking hours each week, I go to each day happily.

Of course, right now I still have a ton of friends in the area who I hang out with and enjoy life with so lonliness is not a factor but we can't all stay here forever. If I follow the typical american path, or at least the one my friends seem to take, I'd be going to grad school in a couple of years (some kind of grad school anyway, MBA, Law or Phd) and then after that would be a whole new set of choices again.