What?
IGCSEs. Cambridge-assessed final examinations. As of writing this article, it is the 5th of May, the night before my IGCSE Coordinated Science (0654) paper 41. They are quite stressful, as you can tell by the title, but it really isn’t all that much.
IGCSEs are simple! All you need to do is memorize the markschemes, do past papers and you’re good. Even if you aren’t comfortable with 5 entire topics, you can watch a few YouTube videos and cram all of it the night before! Such an easy life, no?
Some Spice
There’s a reason why I haven’t updated the site in a while. Trust me, I am working on great things to post and to show off! Writing this article is already a testament to my procrastination; I have 5 (minor) topics to revise, and yet I am working on this article. I’m an intelligent human being!
If I didn’t just have to deal with IGCSEs, I would be cruising. Minimal studying, minimal effort; I’d still get A*’s anyway (as had happened with mocks). However, I am a programmer, I have external responsibilities and projects I want to work on, and a shiny new mathematical society at my school! My math teacher, who just came to our school after being dragged out of her previous school where she had legendary, math jesus2-like status, wanted to start a Math Society.
I told her that day, that our school had never seen a mathematical society ever before. The look on her face was shocking, but also amusing. I laughed on the inside, not at her, but at our school; our school’s demographic consists of just medicine, law, bio/chem, and humanities students. Nobody here liked math enough to start a math society! And nor did anybody have the idea. But she brought it up, and I was slightly enlightened. Being a computer scientist cosplaying as a mathematician, it was hard to announce to this teacher so passionate about math that she started a massive math journal publication with many, many, many contributions (I don’t have an exact page count, but the document was massive), the same person who openly said that she would marry math if it were a person3, and dedicated her effort to serving the people and the math society at her old school; that I was not a true mathematician.
But I am ready to become one. (i still wanna do compiler engineering :P)
More details are to come; this article just announces my existence, but if you are in OFS (Singapore) and are in High School, look out for some amazing things next year. I just did a bunch of planning work, it was fun, but I really have to study for science now.
Bye, and good luck to all Cambridge IGCSE students sitting the May/June 2025 exam series!