AYU'S BIODATA

I am Nor Ayuni Binte Mohamad Saleh. I’m a final year student in National University of Singapore (NUS), majoring in Applied Mathematics. I am self-motivated, organized and a driven person. I take pride in my work, constantly putting in my best effort.

Back in secondary school, I was actively involved in the Student Council and National Police Cadets Corps, represented the school in various activities at cluster and national level. In Junior College, I was in the Touch Rugby school team. Again, I represented the school at national level and participated in many touch carnival. In NUS, I was involved in the Malay society, where I was part of the organizing team for Malam Pentas, which is one of the annually event held by the society.

During school vacations, I had worked at places such as Metro, MOCCA and Chomel. The past work experiences had allowed me to have a glimpse of the real working world. Punctuality, independence, responsibility and confidence is some examples of traits that I have learnt while working.

In life, I aspire to educate the younger generation. To me, this is one of the ways that I could contribute back to the society. This explains my interest to tutor and teach in areas where I am capable of.

On top of the busy academic schedule, I managed to attend a couple of baking classes where I pursue my interest. Baking is a field which I would love to explore after graduating. I desire to attain a qualification in baking. Besides baking, I love vacations. Visited places like Bandung and Mount Kinabalu where the natural sceneries were breathe taking. In the near future, I would love to visit places like Mount Fuji and Taman Negara in Malaysia. After exploring Asia, it is my dream to venture the other beautiful continent of the world to enjoy what nature has to offer.

Edited 31/03/09

LOVE AND MARRIAGE

BEGINS WITH

Love is an emotion related to a sense of strong affection and attachment. Love can be express verbally or non-verbally. Simple actions such as, a peck of kiss on the cheeks and the warmth of a hug, speaks a thousand words of love.

With love, two individuals are brought together and they vow to be life partners. However, the number of people keeping to the vow has been decreasing.

Minister for Community Development, Youth and Sports Dr Vivian Balakrishnan said, the general divorce rate increased from 3.8 per 1,000 married resident females in 1980 to 8.0 in 2006.
He also mentioned that, two decades ago, only 2.6% of civil marriages registered in 1987 lasted less than five years, now 3.8% of the 2002 marriage cohort divorced before the fifth year. In addition, about 21% of divorces in 2005 were between spouses who had been married for 20 years or more.
Therefore, it is not true to mention that the trend is only increasing among the young couple.

Counseling services were offered, marriage talks were organized and Family Day was celebrated for the past years. Many activities were introduced to enhance effective communication between partners but the trend shows otherwise.

What are the main causes for the trend? Is communication the main problem? Or are there other barriers to ever lasting marriages? Where is the LOVE?

ENDS WITH

COMMON CULTURAL TRAITS, DIFFERENT VIEWS

As mentioned in class, culture is a practice of values or beliefs that are accepted by the society. In this blog post I would like to talk about a culture which I believe has only emerged recently in the Western countries. Pre-marital sex is becoming a norm and practiced by most Westerners, both adults and teenagers. Surprisingly, the society seems to be very open and receptive towards the idea of pre-marital sex. In fact, it is “uncool” for an adult to remain a virgin.

Culture is something that is not stagnant. Culture could also be passed from one society to another. However, when the idea of pre-marital sex was brought to Asian countries, it was not accepted by most of the societies here especially among the older generations. Just take Singapore for example; pre-marital sex is more of a trend than a culture among the teenagers but it is seen as a problem to the society. As we know, the society in Singapore is still quite conservative thus making sexual topics a taboo. In addition, most of the religions practiced here disapprove pre-marital sex.

The question is how such culture managed to influence a conservative society like us. This may be due to exposure from the media and the easy excess to the cyber world. Thus, parents play an important role to educate their children about such issues.

However, problems that is related to pre-marital sex such as abortion has been on the rise in Singapore. This may be due to ineffective communication among parents and their teenage children. As mentioned earlier, sexual topic is still a taboo in our society, thus teenagers turn to alternatives such as experimenting to find answers for their curiosity. This could also be a result of ineffective communication between the media and the viewers. The producer might have intended to convey message A by including some intimate scenes, however the viewers could only remember the intimate scenes from the show instead of capturing the intended message.


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Why did I choose to talk about this culture trait? Recently I and my guy friend, who is Malay, had a conversation with two other friends who are Chinese. I was shocked when they actually asked me and my guy friend if we “had done it” and they were surprised when we told them we have not. To me such topic is still pretty much a taboo even among friends. After the meet up, I actually asked my guy friend why such question was posted to us. According to my guy friend, it is common for his Chinese friends to practice pre-marital sex and some of them even cohabitate. This trait is becoming a norm and they are opened to discuss about it among friends.

The next question that came to my mind was, what about their parents? Do their parents allow them to stay together even before they got married? I guess the Chinese parents are becoming more opened about such issues as compared to the Malay parents. But surprisingly, statistics shows that 248, or half of the 495 newborns registered without a father's name in 2006, had Malay mums. A third of the 495 mums last year were aged 19 or younger. Thus, it is wrong to say that the activity is more common among the Chinese teens than the Malays or teens of other races.

I guess in a country like Singapore, such culture trait have influence the younger community but the acceptance level differ between the different age group and the different races.

Edited 04/03/09