New year, new term, new blog title???!!!

Yep, my blog (formerly known as “Coffee, Chocolate, and Physics”) is now “Shades of Serendipity”. I changed it primarily because I’m not taking a Physics course this year and probably will not for the rest of my uni education haha. I mean, I like Physics, but I wouldn’t want to be misleading and have a student visit my blog hoping to find info on physics at UBC.

So for this post I wanted to share some of my Academic goals for this new term. All are on aspects that I really struggled with or neglected my first term.

1. Do the PRE-READINGS!!!!

It’s so so easy to be lazy and neglect pre-readings or any kind of pre-class work, and trust me, I know this SO well as this was one of the major reasons I struggled last term. I genuinely thought that pre-readings were negligible and that I could always do the work later and catch up. The problem was, since I didn’t do the pre-class work, lectures became confusing, incomprehensible, and frustrating.

I am a visual learner, when  I read concepts on a page, they naturally sink into my head. I am NOT an auditory learner. When professors lecture, it is so easy for me to get distracted and space out; I don’t think this is necessarily my fault, it is just how my brain is wired. That is why I have learned it is crucial for me to do pre-readings. Going into a lecture not knowing any of the material, and combining it with the fact that it is extremely hard for me to learn by listening made lectures a living nightmare. This term, I will take time out to THOROUGHLY go through the pre-readings and get a better grasp of the material before class.

2.  Never underestimate the power of homework and small assignments

Besides being a visual learner, another aspect of the way I learn is that it takes me a loooong time to truly understand concepts. I have found that for me to completely grasp new material, I have to reread the textbook multiple times and do numerous practice problems, a process that takes a few weeks.

Therefore, homework assignments that would be assigned right after learning new information and that were due in such a short amount of time were really challenging for me. I figured that since each assignment was only worth like 1% of my final grade I could afford to not do as well on hw, knowing that eventually I would figure everything out and be fine for the final. However, those small percentages started to add up! At the end of the term, when I was trying to calculate what I needed on the final to get a certain grade, I found that if I had worked hard and gotten full points on the hw, I could have had a lot more leeway on the final exam. BUT since I didn’t take a lot of assignments seriously, I needed to get really high marks on the final and that stressed me out a lot. So in that sense, I shouldn’t have underestimated the “power” of hw assignments when compared to my overall class grade.

When you really think about it, small assignments are “easy” points. You can get a lot of help on them from TAs and profs if you are struggling; honestly, there is no reason you shouldn’t get full marks or at least most of the marks. So this term, I’m going to try my best to do well on all homework assignments!

Okay, so that was PART 1 of my academic regrets/goals. I decided to split this into two parts because I didn’t want like 3000 words of verbal spewage. Long posts give me anxiety, haha. LOOK OUT FOR PART 2, COMING SOON (hopefully).