Textbooks.

I thought i've seen the last of them when i officially ended my secondary/high school studies two years ago. Sadly, i found out the hard way that it was not the case when i first stepped in into university. In university, at least in NUS and in the course that i'm taking, there's no escaping from textbooks if you want to do well in your studies and not get kicked out from university.

I'm not complaining about textbooks being inefficient or anything, but when you have to buy one textbook for every single subject you are taking each semester, you can't help but to feel pissed sometimes. Take me for example, i am taking five subjects this semester and four of them require textbooks. Two of the subjects even went further to have two compulsory textbooks each. In total, i need to buy myself six textbooks this semester.

Six, can you imagine six? That's almost 3600 pages that i need to finish reading by the end of this 6 months not including the journal articles, assignments and other things of the like. To accomplish that, i think most of us would need to lock ourselves in the room for five hours everyday just to finish the readings. And it would only get worse every semester. They must have thought that we were some lean mean reading machine, which sadly we are not because we are just normal human, when they assigned those reading to us.

And to make matters worse, these textbooks do not come cheap. Each textbooks cost about 50 dollars (six textbooks = 300 SGD = RM 1000++) each brand new. Getting second hand ones on the other hand, is no easier as the lecturers taught it would be very fun if they kept changing the books each semester. For students like me, that would mean a month of skipped lunches just to save enough money to cover the textbooks costs. We are, after all, just normal humans, not some money printing machines.

Sigh. Textbooks. And they wonder why the suicide rates is so high among university students.