I am finally finished my first year at UBC, sorry for my lack of posts in the past few months, as you can see I was quite busy with this schedule:

While not unmanageable I would have really appreciated a lunch break somewhere in there.  My average dropped by about 3% which is not too horrible but a little strange because I did far better on all of my midterms compared to last term, apparently I didn’t do so well on quite a few of my finals. Most of my midterms were in the high 80’s, 90’s and
even high 90’s, so I think I felt pretty comfortable going into the finals and did not stress
all that much about them. I think it is better to do alright on the midterms and then
amazingly on the finals.

My math final was horrible. I was about to leave Totem to bike to it when suddenly I realized that I could not find my bike/room keys. Anywhere! There were 20 minutes to go and I was still in my room looking through bags, through my laundry, drawers, you name it. They were gone! With 15 minutes to go I finally gave up and started to run to the exam. I ran all the way from Totem Park to the SSC… wearing flats.

By the time I got there I was completely stressed out. I sat myself down, looked at the paper and freaked out. I’ve never panicked on an exam like that before. I had studied a good three days straight just for math and looking at the paper I suddenly lost all the common sense I had. I was making tiny mistakes, questions that were relatively straightforward looked like gibberish… It was not fun. Half-way through the exam I started making some progress and returned to my normal brain function, but I kept thinking “Oh my god, I have wasted half this time, oh my god, I am not going to pass this exam, oh my god my average is going to drop like crazy, oh my god, I am not going to get into the program of my choice”…It was not very helpful. I was pretty disappointed with my Math final, I am usually pretty good at Math so I don’t think my final mark really reflected my capabilities, but, you know, it was a learning experience….

The Chemistry final was the strangest. I am not very fond of chemistry, although I really like the labs.  It is just so vague, where in real life am I going to be mixing up a solution containing some random ingredients that I will never find in my house? Ok, maybe some parts like the organic chemistry molecules aren’t that vague, but for the most part I have very little interest in chemistry.
While I was studying for the exam I was making guesses about all the answers and getting almost every single one right, without any idea as to why. It was both reassuring and alarming. I obviously didn’t know what I was doing conciously, but my subconcsious seemed to have figured things out. On the final my random guessing technique did not do so well. The questions were more in depth (a ton of drawing the reaction mechanism questions) and I ended up with my first B at UBC.

The rest of my exams went ok and all in all I think it was a good term at UBC.