This photo was taken when my friends, Atox, Nan, Jemir and the one who took the picture (I can't remember who) came to visit three of us (Ali, Abu Sufian n me) in University of Essex, Colchester, UK. They were studying in University of Bristol (correct, correct, correct me if I'm wrong, guys) and were on UK tour when they came to our place.
From left: Ali, Atox, Nan, me (with black n red Planet Hollywood cap), Abu Sufian (white top) and Jemir (black jacket), posing in front of one of the uni's students' accommodations called Wivenhoe Tower. I think Abu stayed there, Ali in another tower I can't remember what, and I stayed in another tower called Bertrand Russell Tower, with British, Irish, Scottish, Welsh and Singaporean apartment mates.
Our batch consisted of 45 of us, sent to various universities all over UK and we were all Telekom Malaysia's sponsored students. I was the oldest among them, 5 years older. Why? That's another story for another day. In fact, that is one of the reasons why I wrote that I am forever indebted to Telekom Malaysia.
Unlike them who all graduated successfully from their respective universities, I unfortunately, due to certain circumstances, did not finish my engineering degree there but decided to come back to Malaysia and continue my study in Universiti Telekom (before they rebranded it to Multimedia University later), back in 1997 in Bukit Beruang, Melaka and ended up graduating with an IT degree from MMU, Cyberjaya in 2000, the year I joined TM as an employee.
Truth be told that Yayasan Telekom had asked me to finish my degree in UK and was ready to buy me another open ticket for me to go back to UK and prepare myself to resit the final exams. And the university itself, had literally "begged" me to fly back to UK too, up to the point that they had sent me the final exam questions to my house in my kampung in KT, the exact same questions for the 3 courses that I purposely flunked during the actual exams, for me to answer, or copy answers from wherever sources I like and send the answers back to them, which I was very, very sure, they would have passed me with no questions asked. The reason was simple, they made lots and lots of money from us, foreign students studying in UK, with exorbitant course fees etc. etc., and to lose one of the foreign students might have caused them to part with around 30K pounds (roughly RM210K at that time) per annum!
Nevertheless, after some deep-thinking, and evaluating my own capabilities who was facing some very very difficult situations at that time (and to cut another long story short), I decided to stay in Malaysia and finish my degree right here in Malaysia, albeit much later than all of them! Even some of them came back to become my tutors and lab engineers in MMU. What a life!!
As a matter of fact, two of them have become PhD holders. Congrats to Dr Hafizal and Dr Hezerul. Doctors at the tender age of 32!!
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