It’s break week here at SMU. But what break? There are no breaks. We go hard all semester long. Go hard or go home. The GSRs were full last Sunday, and they’ve stayed full ever since. George Kuah, in truth, is the embodiment of all that is hardcore about our beloved SMU. Look at that lion on our school logo. Fierce; fucking fierce. Just like all of us students here – fucking fierce.

Everyone’s taking this break week as an opportunity to get up to speed with studying for whatever remaining mid-terms there are; as well as to try to jump start upcoming projects, with complete disregard for fellow group members social lives. In the minds of all of us who have blue, white and gold blood flowing through our veins, break week = no official school classes = additional time to come to school to do nothing and act cool cause our social lives have been completely eradicated = a general perception that break week really means break balls week = 17,4289 scheduled meetings for school related purposes just because.

But what divides the average (already high and mighty) SMU student from the likes of George Kuah is that I have the perfect combination of smarts and knowing how to work smart. You see I know that the variance of project grades do not have massive influxes and swings, therefore group projects don’t affect your grades as much as exams do (yes that’s right, projects are overhyped). And that is why, I mug and mug for my own personal welfare, giving it a full 150 percent effort, and not giving a 100 percent effort towards group projects, letting my group members do more work than me. But I camouflage this by acting like a big shot big time boss of the group when I need to show my group members that I have good leadership capabilities. When called into action, I evaluate the other group members work and excel sheets, giving them my analysis of the good and bad, my cognitare like criticism of their low quality powerpoint slides, and ending off with recommendations – which allows me to show off a range of good consulting skills (bain and BCG, if you’re reading please take note). Then I send out emails telling people what good jobs they’ve been doing and praising them, whilst making sure to CC the Prof. Now, if you look at the bigger picture, I do 20 % of the amount of work and effort that the other group members put in, but I still get the same grade. Which gives me leverage over my own group members when it comes to exams as I technically have had more time to study and soak in all the knowledge from my McGraw-Hill textbooks.

Sly and ruthless you might say. But the A+ is mine, and that my friends, is what’s important in this university society of mine. Nothing else really matters. Let us not forget, that the M in SMU stands for management – we are essentially a Management school after all, and what that really means, is that I come to school to learn to tell other people what to do in a nice way, without them thinking I’m a bum.

“I study Management” = “I learn how to give instructions to other people without me having to do any real work”

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