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Benly's back! Hellooooo! Hello everyone indeed and sorry i missed those blimmin' spam messages. I have a cunning plan that will banish spam from my board forever - all will be revealed in a couple of weeks...

Benly, your English is brilliant. Well done, man!!!

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Benly: Very nice to see you back again. Glad to hear that you have completed you finals. I hope you will be able to keep up your studies. You seem to be very determined to finish what you start. I hope you are able to go as far as you want. Your driving job sounds very interesting. You get to see some of the countryside and get payed for it at the same time. I would like that. Will we see more of you now that your finals are over???? Take care and have a great summer.

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Hi Haruka,

Those rubbish messages are really annoying. I won’t spend a second to read them. Many thanks for your admiration, you really have given me a lot of encouragement but I don’t know how long I can keep studying, that I’m sure of. As long as I can cope with the course without any problems I will keep studying. I know myself very well, once I give up studying, that will mean I won’t be going back to do it again in the future. Luckily, I have lots of people to support me, like my family, Teachers and you.

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Benly, weren't you surprised at intrusive spam messages? Anyway your tireless work to improve and upscale your academic credential deserves my unconditional praise. And, your English is now beyond my capacity to distinguish it from native one. Your point regarding students' part-time job is a very important issue but I'm afraid the time to discuss right or wrong is long over. In Japan, now, university students are not privileged few. Especially in big cities, you will see more university graduates than not in the same age group. There is also a structural change in Japanese economy which is not so different from what happened in U.K. and U.S. We have more service industries than manufactureing, which require more disciplined but not necessarily skilled or committed workers particularly when Japanese government has yet to fully open the door to foreign workers. Flexible and less unionist-minded students have to fill the gap. Work ethic, too, might have changed after our slip from the high growth period. Excellence through hard work like Abraham Lincoln or you is becoming one of the options among the diversities of value. Benly, there is always a brighter side. My generation used to look down on the people working as waiters or waitresses. I observe these days young customers to drop at any service industry behave politely with enough decorum as they may be in their shoes next day. It should be nothing to wonder but sometimes it still looks fresh to me.

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Hello Jo, Duane, Haruka and everyone on this board,

I just finished my exams and it was the hardest six weeks of my life indeed. Luckily they all went very smoothly. Now I just have to sit and wait till late August when the results come out. Hopefully, they are the same as what I want.

I had my last exam yesterday morning, after that the college started the second year courses straight away, so everyone was without any rest. They said we would have more time for the final year. I suppose it is a good idea. I also start my part-time work straight away, after I had six weeks off for my exams. I had this job since I finished my Summer job last year. It is a supermarket driver job and I need to work at least 15 hours a week for them, but I always end up working more than 25 hours, because it is very hard to say what time you will finish work when you are driving on the road. Sometimes I work more than 50 hours during the college holiday. For the coming Summer holiday I have already agreed to work full time and some over- time as well. I think I will keep this part-time job, because the shift is when I have free time so I can offer to work at any time.

Haruka, I suppose most of your students also have a part-time job. I would like to share some of the experience with them. It is very hard to do studying and working at the same time. I know most of my classmates also have a part-time job. This may have some bad effects on their studying. Do you think they should just concentrate on their studying now and put earning money idea after they have finished studying, because they have their working life in many many years ahead of them? Or on the other hand, their studying may just have a couple years left, so why should they be so desperate to earn some money and it may deteriorate their study?