Week 9!

It's definitely been a crazy few weeks with all the assessments being due. I've been After so long I've had to take maths again! It's been 4 years since I've done proper maths and even longer since I learnt the algebraic rules for everything. Thank goodness I chose the "easier" maths as recommended for people who didn't do so well in high school maths. We've now progressed into sin/cos/tan graphing, matrices and vectors. Yeah, graphing wasn't my strong point so I take ages to figure out the question... So far the other topics aren't too bad. So far..

In addition to maths, I'm taking second year statistics without taking first year stats. At the start of the semester the content was very overwhelming and coming up to the mid semester exam I was stressing out very badly. Our lecturer said that he decided to lower the fail mark because some people didn't do so well and throughout the talk he kept on looking over at me. My heart was pounding because it looked like he was directing the comment in my direction. When we finally got our results back at the end of that week, I found out that I ended up doing better than some classmates who took year 1 stats which made me very happy indeed! This next lot of work seems easier in comparison because I managed to work out how to calculate the basic tables which is central to everything in this subject!

My other subject, Plants, has been very content heavy and time consuming. It's definitely not as assessment heavy but there is just so much to learn about plants it's almost crazy. There's a stack of definitions I have to wrap my head around and every week we progressively move onto another classification of plants. Mark wise this is worst subject so far but that's all down to the weighting of assessment pieces. The total percentage of the assessments we've completed so far add up to 20% in comparison to maths where we've already reached the 45% mark. Here's one page of my plant herbarium assignment. The one thing I learnt while gluing it on: any plant looks great flattened, glued down on white cardboard and labelled in the corner.

Last week I went to see my sister at her university. Gosh I love how quiet it is out there! We stood by these horses while we chatted away. It was a great day :)

Aside from university I've been obsessing over Orphan Black! (Recap from my last post: SBS has been running 4 hour marathons on Saturday and Sundays for viewers to catch up in preparation for their season 4 premiere. My sister forced me to watch the first two episodes and I was hooked!) So as I watched episode after episode, I realised I actually watched segments of Orphan Black a few years ago while I was channel surfing.

That scene above where Helena wants to see that guy's tail... Before then when they have CCTV shots of Helena walking through corridors and Sara being taken away by a couple of guys... I saw that part and I changed the channel thinking it was a slasher-horror movie. And you know I'm not a fan of horror movies. Darn, I wish I watched more of it! Oh well. And I also saw Helena being Alison when she checks up on Donnie at the drug dealer's place. Speaking of... I changed my sister's laptop background while she was away to the image below.

She's back tomorrow. We shall see her reaction.
A

Update: For a second she was shocked but then she started laughing her pants off. She loves it!

Forward Momentum

Life has been pretty good for me lately. I'm back at university next Monday (not tomorrow) and I've had a decent break from everything.

Last week I got a text from one of my teachers who wanted to know if I'd be a mentor for the first year students. Of course, I debated this for a little while before decided to give it a shot. I mean, yes, I am a shy person and I wouldn't have thought I'd be in any public speaking position but I'm giving it a go. Who knows, this might be something I enjoy!

So we had training all day on Thursday in which we learnt about the services my uni offers, communication skills, dealing with certain interruptions in group conversations and learning various ice breaker games and communication techniques. It wasn't a large group but when I got picked on to answer questions, I kind of flipped. Haha, no wonder I decided to not pursue drama in high school! I'm seriously bad at public speaking and I don't like everyone's attention on me... my heart was practically racing when the experienced mentors were picking people! But it was a wonderful training sesh.

On Friday my sister and I went OP shopping because she needed to get a few bits of clothing for her uni dorm parties. We looked for Hawaiian shirts, tight/bright/shiny clothing, zombie socks and what not. We stopped by a community bookstore and I found my favourite author's books! For $6 each! They sell online for at least $8 plus postage! I purchased 2 books simply because I couldn't remember which ones I had at home already! Whoops! But I will go back and finish my collection!

Today we said bye to my little sister as she embarks on her own little journey a good hours' drive into the country. It was quite the experience, moving into a dormitory. Loads of clothes, books, bathroom essentials and stuff. We spent the morning helping her get her stuff in and then head off for lunch and a parental session on campus life. Honestly, they aimed the talk at newly graduated high school students so my parents and I totally zoned out for most of it haha. They spoke a decent amount on drinking on campus as well as issues arising from feeling like their the only one going through hardship and what not.

I guess the thing that surprised me the most was how casually the second year students handled a snake in the room down the hall from my sister's. They casually reported it to the floor leader who then called security and they caught it together! I know that doesn't seem strange to some of you but where I live, we have no snakes that come onto our property at all! With the exception of one really big snake in the summer of 2009-ish which tried to eat our birds. But it's bizzare... then again she is in a rural area.... Just strange to me haha.

Tomorrow, I introduce a bunch of first years to my own university. I feel weird saying that now because we just left my sister over at another university. But I guess in a way it closes the gap? I guess we'll see how it goes then :D

This semester will be another busy one for me, not as crazy as 2014 though. Hopefully. :D
A