Monthly Archives: October 2012

Fire alarms.

If I should ever find the dumb-asses that decided to go around Totem Park this morning and pull all the fire alarms simultaneously at 4 in the morning and again at 6 so that we all had to evacuate in our PJs and slippers in the cold:

It also doesn’t help that I’m one of those people that take forever to fall asleep and ended up sleeping at seven. In the morning.

For those of you planning to live on campus next year: rez is still awesome, but keep in mind that there will be times where it is equally un-awesome.

**Please don’t think I’m a psychopath because of these gifs. Sleep deprivation does not bode well with me.

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Dain Bramaged….

Oh my god. The PHYS 153 midterm yesterday. I don’t even.

It’s like someone took my brain, extracted it through my nose and then pan-fried it. Gruesome, I know, but so was the midterm. Coming out of the exam, it seemed like everyone else was in the same position of me, given all the swearing and trembling hands as we turned in our papers. I spent way too much time going over heat transfer problems from the previous midterms and while taking the exam, this wild blackbody radiation problem comes up, giving you the radius of Mars, the ratio between its distance from the Sun and Earth’s distance from the sun, and then it asked you to find the temperature of Mars. What. The. Shitake mushrooms. Let’s just say there’s a 100% chance that I failed this midterm. I just pray to God that they decide to scale the midterm… until then, I’ll eat away my sorrows by buying buckets of chocolate ice cream.

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I’m alive! (for now…)

Just wanted to take a really quick minute to let you know that no, I’m not dead… yet. The PHYS 153 midterm tomorrow just might kill me, though. You should all know that studying for half an hour and then rewarding yourself by going on YouTube and Tumblr for an hour is not a very efficient way to study.

Hopefully I’ll be able to walk into the midterm tomorrow and not be swallowed up into the fiery depths of thermodynamics where the only way I’ll be able to get out is to calculate the work done by the toxic gas at constant volume that will lead to an increase in temperature high enough to incinerate my body and ohmygodI’vespentwaytoomuchtimereadingthetextbook. If I don’t make it out alive tomorrow, I want you all to know that you’re all amazing and I love you.

But for future first-year engineers: PHYS 153 actually isn’t that bad– just stay on top of your work.

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Brace yourselves….

Midterms have begun and as a first year, that’s scary as hell. Especially in engineering where the drop-out rate is over fifty percent, walking into any sort of exam is like walking into the dragon’s lair. Luckily, my only “exam” today was the APSC 150** quiz that I spoke of in my earlier post. It was surprisingly easy; the entire first page of questions was taken exactly from the sample quiz that was posted on Vista. They even asked about why you shouldn’t talk in the middle of presentations, hahah!

I’ve only had one test so far, but I can offer you a few tips for tests:

  1. Review. It’s the easiest way to retain information and you won’t have to cram as much later. Just take ten minutes a day to go over your notes and that’s it!
  2. Don’t be so quick to deactivate Facebook. I know everyone says to delete or deactivate your Facebook, but honestly, it’s pretty useful at times. There’s a lot of great people who have made Facebook groups for specific classes where you can post questions, help other people, discuss concepts and set up study groups.
  3. Eat. A full tummy = happy, healthy brain. ‘Nuff said.
  4. Don’t focus too much on finding the perfect place to study because as long as you’re comfortable and nothing is too distracting, you can get your work done. Go to a library, the floor lounge, or a cafe, sit down, plug in your headphones if it’s noisy, and just work. I find that when I say I’m not in a “good” study location, I’m really just making an excuse to not study.
  5. Midterms begin when the weather starts to get a little chilly, so some hot tea or coffee when you’re studying or on your way to a test goes a long way in soothing those anxious pre-exam nerves 🙂

Now, one test down, three to go. Let’s do this.

(You didn’t think I was gonna leave this post GIF-less, did you? 😉 )

**Edit: APSC is an applied science course that’s required for all first-years. APSC 150 covers a bunch of case-studies, for example, civil engineering cases, mining engineering, etc as a way to teach you how to behave and work as a professional engineer. The other required first-year APSC course is APSC 160, which is about programming. You take one or the other each semester. Shout out to Courtney for reminding me to explain what the course is!

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