Along the Orange Road.

After the recent Bandung trip I made my mind up that instead of going overseas to ITB to further my education, I would instead settle for the cheaper, more closer-to-home alternative in Nilai. And it was because of this decision that I became the first (and, as of yet, only) person to register for a Bachelor's degree in Actuarial Finance at Manipal International University (MIU), if not in the whole of Malaysia.

A view of the MIU Nilai Campus. Photo courtesy of Facebook.

Prior to my registration I'd already known that this was a fairly new university, and was yet to produce any graduates. However, I was fairly surprised to find out that the most senior students there were still only in the third semester of their first year.

Sticking with the 'new' theme, MIU had only moved to its vast Nilai campus on Monday, 21st of January. Up until then the university had called Kelana Jaya its home, albeit a temporary one as the building it was using was shared with some sort of training center that belonged to Malaysia Airlines (MAS).

On the day of the big move (which coincided with my second day of orientation) I arrived before pretty much all my other orientation-mates as I'd left home early to avoid the traffic jams of the Monday rush hour. I took the time to walk around and check out the spanking-new campus, or at least as much of it as I could.

The university was apparently supposed to cover a massive 136 acres upon its completion, and as only one wing of the main building - and even then, only three of its five floors - were available to be used, it was safe to say that in terms of construction, it had a long way to go. Still, at least it was an improvement from my last visit - I had been denied entry to the site only two or three weeks before as it was still under construction at the time.

So anyway, orientation went fine. The seniors were warm and friendly, and intelligent to boot. (They had to be, most of them were either engineering or biotechnology students.) The orientation committee members were all part of the MIU Student Representative Council (SRC), and it was rather humbling to discover that their president was a fresh SPM graduate from an MRSM in Johor - when I was a fresh SPM graduate at this time last year, I spent my days kicking my heels and generally lazing about at home. 

A fellow orientation-mate, a Business Administration student from Zambia, described MIU as a "project". I realized she was right. And now, I too was part of this project.

I'd been here before. The parallels with my Rembau experience were uncanny. But unlike Rembau, we're all adults here. There would be no youthful rebelliousness and insolence to get in the way of progress. No naive decisions from novice leaders. No bad apples to spoil the others in the sack. Here was a project that could actually turn out good - great, even. It could be everything I had dreamed Rembau would be, and more.

The motto of my beloved Valedictorians is that 'Pioneers Create History'. And create it we shall.