My latest school assignment is about designing a website to promote NTU as a arts and cultural hub.
Since when did they start grading the impossible? I mean, it is okay if you want me to promote the artistic and cultural aspects of NTU, but trying to rebrand it as a hub is kind of stretching it.
Just because Singapore likes to slap the word "hub" on anything that is three buildings of the same type clustered together doesn't mean that NTU automatically qualifies as a hub for arts and culture just because it has an auditorium for holding arts performances, or a fancy glass building with grass on its roof and none on the ground.
If that were the case, all those hair care centres would all be arts hubs, because they can grow grass where there weren't any before.
The problem is, this assignment is actually graded. So it means that as a student, you start to dig into your deepest reserve, the endless capacity to bullshit. Any student worth his salt knows it. When you have an exam question that asks you for five factors and you only remember four, you simply rephrase the fourth and use it as the fifth.
It also calls for another skill, a very simple one, simply called "never say it as it is". If your school has a violin club with 10 members in it, call it an orchestra. If it has a dance club, call it a masterclass in movement. If there are a series of shit boring academic lectures coming up, rebrand it as "once-in-a-lifetime talks by distinguished faculty of prestigious institutions highlighting important social issues". Wait, NTU already does that.
Damn, you know something is wrong when they do that and still nobody turns up.
Notice I didn't mention anything about the website design part of it. That is because designing a website is actually possible, even if I have to outsource the damn thing because of my lack of website creation skills.
I fear that even with my skill at trying to pull a fast one over the eyes of the unsuspecting lecturer, this assignment is doomed to failure. My only reprieve is that since it is a bell curve system, it is now about who dies a more dastardly death.