Friday 10 September 2010

a day of slack

whee, had a free day today. Completed comfortably what I planned to study.. because it wasn't alot on the first place. Starting to make my summaries/revise sheets of my Psych chapters and also working towards my mid term paper! So exciting :)

I think I'm not as mucked down as everyone else because
1) I keep up with my work
2) I only have 1 real content heavy subject, which is PL1101. The rest are not -
- French is just regular practice with friends and regular revision. Not alot of memorizing or anything. Though I can prob spend more time on this because I cant seem to remember vocabulary -_-

- New Media.. I don't know WHAT to memorize if I was even supposed to memorize anything. just try to understand the concepts i guess. Readings are not that much.. well they are extremely complicated so I never really understand them anyway so I don't bother memorizing HAH

-Philo - The readings are usually fun and abstract.. last week's one was really hard not sure about this week's one. I'm only quite worried because i'm graded on this weekly summary i have to do.. and it's 40% of my total marks for this module. And i only got 2/4 for the first summary! fml

-Psych Stats - open book exam... need i say more. lol. Nothing much to memorize, the concepts so far are pretty easy to understand and internalize. Just worried that the lectures are always so confusing because the HK lecturer can't word his notes properly and talks funnily, and there is a disparity between what he says and the book (the textbook is really good)
3) I don't have any CCA.

yup. so. so free! i think i played about 6 hours of starcraft today. maybe more. haha. won a large bunch of 4v4s with darryl/ben and darryl's friend. But still stuck in Gold league -_- the promotion system is bugged i tell you.We're something like.. 20-2 or something.

Ok.. wanna go sleep now so i can mug again tmr. chowz ppl

Wednesday 8 September 2010

ramblings of an undergrad

Week 5.
In the flash of an eye, it's been 5 weeks since I've started university life. I've been wanting to make this post for awhile but never got about to doing it.. so here I am.

So many people ask - how is uni? how are you handling uni? or other variations to this question.
Well, uni is not quite what I expected, tho I was quite prepared for it. This sounds paradoxical I know, I'll explain.

I expected uni to be tougher than previous education, but more fun, since I am studying things that I WANT to study, not about how positive and negative ions form ionic bonds and memorizing pointless terms like 2,4-dinitrophenylhydrazine that are just cool to say but have zero practical value.
I expected uni to be relatively free, because that was the impression I got from some people. Like, no more fixed lessons from 8am in the morning to afternoon, it's a flexible schedule.
I expected to make alot of friends.. simply because I want to.

Well, uni IS tougher than previous education. And uni is definitely more fun. Learning about circadian patterns, (our sleep cycle), Pavlov's many experiments on Classical Conditioning in more detail and proactive/retroactive interference which affects our memory. I'm virtually never bored when studying.
Flexible? yes. I go to school at different times every single day. And i have no school on tuesdays :)
Make alot of friends? Yea, thanks to camp, I have a regular bunch of people that I can have lunch with or meet up to study and go for lessons together with.

What was contrary to my expectations was the 'relatively free' part. Being in Arts, the amount of readings we have to do is insane. Imagine an upper secondary Biology textbook, covered over 2 years. The Psych textbook is twice (or more) that size, and is covered in 12 weeks or so.
I'm not even taking many content heavy subjects.. only Psych is heavy for me.

I am studying during virtually all my breaks in school, and my 'free days' of tuesday and weekends are spent studying too. It's like, mugfest.

And the annoying thing is, my circle of friends all tell me that i'm 'too mugger', that i 'study too much la!' . But it's not like i'm doing EXTRA or anything.. I just do the week's assigned readings. To them, lagging behind is the norm.
K wait that's not the annoying thing.. the annoying thing is, even though I study so much, it's very possible that I will not do better than all of them, because

1) Modules are marked on a bell curve, so let's say I do pretty well in all my modules but those taking my modules do EVEN BETTER.. my grades will become shit.

2) The modules other people take may consist of all slackers or something, so getting an A may be very easy.

3) Thus, their CAP will be better than me.

Ok i know this is a faulty conclusion due to the faulty reasoning #2, but another matter is that amount of studying does not necessarily lead to better grades. If I am not able to apply what I have learnt to the questions in the exams, it will come to naught.

So really, all i hope for is that my grades will reflect the amount of effort I put in. Because I am perpetually tired with all this studying, my sleep isn't very sound because I'm always worrying (or rather, thinking) about what I'll be doing the next day
etcetc.

Because if at the end of the day I get a decent CAP (above 4, as close to 5 as possible) I will feel it's worth it. The hard work I put in, the endless hours I spent studying, all this - it's all worth it.
If i DONT.... I think I'll just feel like shit. Like fmd, wasting my time studying so hard.

Alright, just wanted to pen that down. If you are really reading all this.. I'm honoured that you're so interested in my life. je t'aime, tres tres t'aime!

a bientot~

Friday 3 September 2010

mrbrown does it again

Lol this is funny shit.
context:
PM Lee announces in National Day Rally that NSMen will be getting 9k (10k for commanders) in 3 phases. However, this only applies for those who have not finished their 10 cycles of reservist. Those who finished, ('ROD'ed) they wont be getting this payouts.

[youtube http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oZpQmYO8S5s&fs=1&hl=en_US]