Take It In Stride
Exams began yesterday, two weeks after my last post--yes, it's terribly irregular posting. In my defense I've been busy reducing all my lectures to a small pile of written-on foolscaps (someday I'll photograph those foolscaps and put them up here so I can burn them and still have a copy around to refer to in future--or I'll have them scanned on the school computers if/when Herr Robson returns me my thumbdrive, or if/when I borrow one from Easy Kill).
I'm taking a bit of time off my regular studying schedule to bring you this post because--unsurprisingly, really--I misread my exam timetable and thought the exam would be at 9am; it's actually at 2.30pm. Regardless, it means I slept very little between yesterday and now (about four hours really) and have already gone through the examinable material to my own satisfaction, though of course I'll be re-reading again shortly to buff up memory of the various formulae and conditions, characteristics, etc.
Yesterday's exam was Genes. Thank God for past-year papers! which I couldn't find, but which Tee Four somehow managed to get a copy of (off the library website actually which I neglected to check on); apparently the papers don't differ much from year to year, and it was a very simple exam really once I figured out which of the many lectures' details I might want to focus on. Not too bad I'd say; I'm fairly confident of an A- or at least a B on that--I finished the 50 MCQs in a little less than half an hour, doublechecked and found one or two careless mistakes, and then made sure I shaded the correct spots. I don't like shading spots, because one often tends to actually get the correct answer and shade the wrong spot or the wrong number: careless perhaps but still costly mistakes. In any case I'm relatively sure I didn't do those.
And through all this I'm still rather... de-stressed, perhaps? I'm certainly not feeling anything more than a certain lassitude, or what I look at my notes, a degree of panic not unlike the kind you would get if you were about to skydive for the first time and you just realised you had been daydreaming during the instructions. I of course have past-year papers to refer to, and tutorials and suchlike, but still... the panic comes and then goes away, and then comes again. It's quite annoying. But otherwise I'm just feeling nothing at all--well, on occasion I start wondering why we're putting all this effort into a few bits of paper that won't really help us find jobs anyway, what with the recession and engineers apparently being common as all heck--or perhaps watching Dilbert too much tends to colour my view of the world a little.
And not for the first time, I wonder why my course covers such a diverse selection of topics; while everybody else seems to specialise in some form of engineering or other (say, mechanical, or electrical, or aeronautics), my syllabus seems to be spread all over the board--my modules this semester include such things as electronics, materials science, fluid mechanics, and biomolecular engineering--in fact it's pretty much what I'd call mishmash engineering with a certain bias towards in-body applications, and I've commented before that it's not impossible for all my lecturers to team up and present one situation in which all their syllabi could be combined into one giant killer question.
I suppose it encourages flexibility, though.
The next two weeks are going to see me rack up quite an astounding sleep debt, I should think. And I still have to get Gobbler and go to get our visas done...
I'm taking a bit of time off my regular studying schedule to bring you this post because--unsurprisingly, really--I misread my exam timetable and thought the exam would be at 9am; it's actually at 2.30pm. Regardless, it means I slept very little between yesterday and now (about four hours really) and have already gone through the examinable material to my own satisfaction, though of course I'll be re-reading again shortly to buff up memory of the various formulae and conditions, characteristics, etc.
Yesterday's exam was Genes. Thank God for past-year papers! which I couldn't find, but which Tee Four somehow managed to get a copy of (off the library website actually which I neglected to check on); apparently the papers don't differ much from year to year, and it was a very simple exam really once I figured out which of the many lectures' details I might want to focus on. Not too bad I'd say; I'm fairly confident of an A- or at least a B on that--I finished the 50 MCQs in a little less than half an hour, doublechecked and found one or two careless mistakes, and then made sure I shaded the correct spots. I don't like shading spots, because one often tends to actually get the correct answer and shade the wrong spot or the wrong number: careless perhaps but still costly mistakes. In any case I'm relatively sure I didn't do those.
And through all this I'm still rather... de-stressed, perhaps? I'm certainly not feeling anything more than a certain lassitude, or what I look at my notes, a degree of panic not unlike the kind you would get if you were about to skydive for the first time and you just realised you had been daydreaming during the instructions. I of course have past-year papers to refer to, and tutorials and suchlike, but still... the panic comes and then goes away, and then comes again. It's quite annoying. But otherwise I'm just feeling nothing at all--well, on occasion I start wondering why we're putting all this effort into a few bits of paper that won't really help us find jobs anyway, what with the recession and engineers apparently being common as all heck--or perhaps watching Dilbert too much tends to colour my view of the world a little.
And not for the first time, I wonder why my course covers such a diverse selection of topics; while everybody else seems to specialise in some form of engineering or other (say, mechanical, or electrical, or aeronautics), my syllabus seems to be spread all over the board--my modules this semester include such things as electronics, materials science, fluid mechanics, and biomolecular engineering--in fact it's pretty much what I'd call mishmash engineering with a certain bias towards in-body applications, and I've commented before that it's not impossible for all my lecturers to team up and present one situation in which all their syllabi could be combined into one giant killer question.
I suppose it encourages flexibility, though.
The next two weeks are going to see me rack up quite an astounding sleep debt, I should think. And I still have to get Gobbler and go to get our visas done...
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