MY EXPERIENCE IN PERMATApintar™

                It all started out when I was 13. Things went so fast I couldn’t catch up with the fiction that I was going through. I got my UPSR results the year before that. I went to a normal secondary school where my mom teaches only to know almost a month after that my primary school teacher didn’t send my boarding school proposal form to the Education Department. My mom had to send it in herself. I got in the best boarding school in my district right after my form was sent, surprisingly making a lot of friends right away.

                It was there I learnt about PERMATApintar™, asked to take an online exam which I thought was stupidly long only to realize that I have to take it again because I passed. So I did, as a favour to my mom. I totally forgot about it until one day my name was announced at school to go to the counselors’ room. The only thing I can think about at that time was ‘did I do anything wrong the past weeks’. I went to the counselor feeling insecure. All the bad things I done as a hostel kid rushed into my head. Cutting prep classes, being horribly noisy at the dorm, bringing cellphones, bullying – everything. Then she congratulated me for passing the test and was accepted to go to a special camp. I was surprised, but I still kept my charm. Hey, I have a reputation to keep. Keep the pride.

                Held in a university, the PERMATApintar™ camp was awesome. If I could think of any other way to explain it, it would be ‘awesomely awesome’. The best camp I’ve ever been to. I got the course MP which regarded language. For my class, MP4, we were the only class to learn about English. The other MP’s learnt Malay. Literally the best camp, ever. I was looking forward to the next. Even my friends at school can see how much I loved it. The next year, I passed the test again. Yes, that means I can meet my friends at the camp again! I was so psyched to go. I got the course of Cryptology which means I had to learn math, the subject I hate most. To make it worse, it wasn’t just math, it was add math.

                I also learnt that that was not the only thing I would hate about the camp that year. My old friends changed. We were not how we used to be. But to look at the bright side, I made new friends.  We laughed together, cried together. The bond we had was unbreakable. I went through that year’s camp with them happily. The year after that, I got accepted. Yes, again. This time, I got the course of Fast-paced Biology. Just like the name, us young kids have to learn Biology in a fast pace. It was amazing. Splendid, I might add. My course was divided into two classes but we were so close that it felt like there was only one class. We were a big family, and we still are. We even have a family tree!

                In the fourth year, I was already too old to be joining the camp. That was the limit. But it turned out that I was accepted into the Program Pendidikan PERMATApintar™ or as we love to call it, Quad P. It is almost like a high school, but we don’t call it that way. We are living in a university now! As you might expect, I am not a very good student. I made cases once in a while. Sometimes just for fun. I learn a lot of things though. Here I’ve been through a lot of mental breakdowns. And I also got through almost all of them.

                If you were to ask me what the most important lesson I got was, it would be that experience is the best teacher.

xoxo,

Al ♥