Author Archives: jannickep

First UBC Exam

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Ahhh so I have finally completed my first course at UBC! Exciting… even if there are millions more to come… at least I have made a start in my journey towards post-secondary education! I will post information about the course later in the week.

Anyways while I am awaiting the day that my final mark pops up on Vista I have decided to do a post on what the UBC exam was like. I am one of those (slightly perfectionistic) people who likes to know exactly what is going to happen and when. I could not find very much material about UBC exams online (besides the very general guidelines from the main website) so here we go with the basics:

-My exam was at 8:30 on a Saturday morning, not nice, but it was a beautiful day, and seen as it was a summertime exam the campus was completely empty.

-It was 3 hours long. My leg managed to fall asleep after hour two which was quite uncomfortable.

-All of the invigilators were our professors, which surprised me.

-A couple of ASTU classes were compounded into the same lecture hall for the exam.

-The atmosphere was pretty relaxed all things considering, no one was pacing up and down the aisles peering down at our papers… at least not that I noticed.

-Everyone places their bags at the front and brings pens, pencils, dictionaries and their UBC card to their table (some people also brought water bottles).

Tips for UBC Examinees:

– Make sure you know exactly where the exam is going to be held: you can look up you exam schedule on the SSC and click on the picture for a map and details about the building, however I would recommend going to check out the exact lecture hall a couple days before the exam… UBC can be a pretty confusing place. Maybe walk around the examination room and see if there is more than one entrance to the room, and find somewhere nice to study if you get there early.

–  Bring a watch!!!! Our lecture hall did not have a clock and although the invigilators wrote every 15 minutes on the board and crossed them off respectively, I am not certain that it was done precisely (some 15 minutes segments felt extremely long!!!). Timing is essential, especially on long exams… I really, really wish that I had had a watch with me!

– Do not arrive late (apparently if you arrive more than half an hour late you are not allowed to enter the room)

– BRING YOUR UBC CARD! You need to have it with you for identification + copying down your UBC number if you are like me and do not know if off by heart yet

– Check and see what materials you can and cannot bring into the exam. For ours we were allowed to bring a standard non-electronic dictionary. Although I did not need to use it, it is better safe than sorry!

– On the same note bring at least 4 pens and pencils… I went through 3 pens on my exam, which was nerve wracking!

I’m sure I will come up with a whole slew of other tips as I get more experienced with this whole exam taking thing. One down a million more to go… joy.

p.s. make sure that you put your name on all your papers

 

 

Taxonomy

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Taxonomy- the art of classification.

I will admit it I am confused, I came across this word in… some book that I am reading, and since looking it up in the dictionary I have decided that it describes much of the mental processes of humanity. (Another one of my expertly clueless and uneducated decisions)

How else would we learn? A child learning to speak points and names things, classifies them and shows that he/she has learnt. As we progress we go from labelling the small to the bigger and the greater. We label people, we label things, we label rooms and other places. We label dendrites and axons, neoliberalism and post-modernism, string theory, geniuses, idiots. We make up our own labels and bring up old labels. From the tangible we go to the intangible and we continue to build on that. Objects intertwine to become mechanisms, mechanisms intertwine to become new labels. And as we learn we are simply labelling infinitely complicated things. The labels that we understand, use and carry define us and our world around us.

“Humanity” it has been said “is simply trying to pixelate a fractal world”. Look at any Google satellite map and note the difference between the natural and the man-made. It is beautiful.

What is labelling? Yes it is making sense, it creates communities, it creates boundaries. But we all know that these boundaries are never precise, often the more you learn the less you actually “know”.

Research, it seems to me likes to box things in. Like trying to capture a river in a drinking glass. Perhaps you can fill the glass to them brim, hold it in your hands, analyze it, drink from it. You can call it yours if you like, feel accomplished and powerful. But in the same way you will never be able to hold every aspect of the world in your mind, you will never be able to capture the entire river… Anyways who would ever want to drink an entire river? Why not just swim in it?

Research is… frustrating!

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What else is new? For my first “research paper” ever I have managed to come up with a mountain of information and ideas yet cannot remember where I know these things from. Even worse I have a some twenty odd things that I want to reference and quote, but have to reload them and bring them up on my tiny little computer screen before I can search the text for the information that I want. Reading on a computer screen is not the same as reading on paper. You cannot organize information as well, and you tend to conduct search and rescue missions rather than comprehend the entire body of text.  The first few articles I looked at I printed off, paperclipped together and highlighted the information that I deemed important… it was an excellent technique! But after coming across more than three 20 page studies I decided that it was not worth wasting all the ink and paper. I am far too impatient to take notes on everything that I read. As a result my current essay is completely incoherent… similar to the state of my mind right about now. I have spots with (name ###) (possibly this person) (look up this fact) NEED TO BACK UP THIS! All throughout my essay. Fortunately I still have an entire week before it is due!!!

Aha, so here comes my not so radical proposal… after wasting a fair bit of time on the internet trying to find some sort of free software that would do everything I want it to I suggest that some incredibly talented person make a software that:

1. Creates citations for the online article automatically (using easy bib or something like that)

2. When you highlight a certain piece of text and press a certain command automatically transfers that segment of text into a document… or no wait! A document within a file folder for that particular pdf, within a file folder for all of your research on Essay A, within a file folder for all of your research ever… e.t.c.

3. Simultaneously creates a document containing all of your research for Essay A (including references)

4. Allows you to print out all of your references with their respective important quotes and information on one single piece of paper (or perhaps a couple of pages)

Dear incredibly talented person reading this who just happens to have a whole lot of free time. After you create this amazing program and market it well enough to frustrated university students, please let me know about it (and some profits would be nice too). Thanks! <3

p.s. any tips would be much appreciated!

 

 

Disappointing Non-Discovery

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For the last few years ( I took two gap years before coming to UBC) I have been working as a high school Math tutor… not because I am particularly astounding at Math, but because under the circumstances it is a flexible job, there is a lot of demand and I somehow manage to do a good job of turning C and below students into A students. I don’t think it is necessarily a job that you need to have a degree to teach with.  While I know next to nothing about higher level Mathematics, I have completed grade 12 and that seems to be sufficient enough to teach it well. Depressingly I often see signs up for tutors who have degrees, even masters who charge about the same amount per hour. It makes me feel like even if I spend my next billion years in school, $30 per hour is probably the most I will ever be paid in my life…

Anyways in trying to explain sinusoidal functions and trig e.t.c. you come across a whole bunch of the ferris/bicycle/ anything wheel problems. That got me wondering about what would happen if you put a point on the base of a cylinder and rolled it along a plane. What shape would you get? My little brain can’t quite figure this sort of thing out on it’s own… So I decided to do my own little experiment to find out. I found a shot glass, taped a piece of pencil lead into the inside edge and rolled it along an old book. It turns out that you actually get semicircular shapes with a period of 2*pi*r… hmm not what I thought, but also not very exciting. Then I wondered what would happen if you rolled the shot glass around another shot glass of the same size. That was a little more interesting! The shape was somewhat like a circle but with an indent. I recognized the shape as being the main one in the Mandelbrot set. I wasn’t entirely sure though, so I went to check if it was the same shape on Wikipedia. Yes it was!!! Amazed by my discovery I started reading the article in a little more depth. Unfortunately upon reading the byline I found out that the shape already had a name: a cardioid and people had known about it hundreds of years ago.  And yes, they made it exactly the same way I did (ok perhaps minus the shot glasses) and there is a billion different wikipedia articles on pretty much every shape you could imagine… Don’t you just hate it when you figure something out, only to learn that in fact it is nothing new?

It seems to me that because we are essentially taught how to think, that we follow the same patterns over and over again. It seems like learning is just building upon those thought patterns that already have been established. And yet so many different thought patterns and things exist that a human lifetime is barely enough to understand anything at all. Sometimes I feel like we are only limited by what we already know. If we can go infinitely small and if we can go infinitely large, perhaps the smallest thing is also the greatest. <3

Always busy.

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There seems to always be long list of things to do, people to see, places to go. Some how no matter how many lines that I cross off each day, new ones appear, a process that repeats itself day after day, year after year. And then the split second I find myself with absolutely nothing to do (or nothing that I can motivate myself to do), I get frustrated and feel like I never have and never will achieve anything in my life. Ah, all the faults with all or nothing thinking!!!

All you can eat yoga for $56 at UBC Rec!

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If you are looking for super cheap yoga classes over the summer UBC Rec is the way to go! Right now until August 4th you can purchase unlimited drop-in yoga classes for only $56. I am so excited about taking class regularly and getting back into shape! As of next week I will be in the studio and taking full advantage of all the classes available =). I’ll let you know how it goes. <3

First Year Course Registration

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After spending an amazing, relaxing weekend with family and friends. Reality hit me at about 10 o’clock last night. Course registration was in a little more than 24 hours and although I had everything planned out and a couple of work lists under my belt, I began to panic about how quickly the courses would fill up. Being new to UBC I had no idea of what to expect, I imagined millions of people clicking away and registering at 8:00 on the dot, which apparently did not seem to be the case.

First Time Course Registration

To all first year students… don’t worry most courses do not fill up all that quickly (unless they are the extremely small courses in which case pray for an early registration date). My registration time was at 1:15 today which was not as early as I had hoped. Another side note, if you have an online course that will bring your average up it probably will not enter the system on time to help push your registration time ahead…. frustrating for me. Panicking away that all courses would fill up and I would have no chance at getting a decent looking time table I decided to go over all my options so that I would be prepared in any worst case scenario. Being the perfectionist that I am I wrote up all the courses that I intended to take along with all of the potential times that I could take them at and roughly the amount of people in each class. That way, on one piece of paper I could pick and plan a variety of “kind” work lists for a couple of scenarios and if a course filled up during the day I could find a substitute time with relative ease. I would highly recommend doing this…. During the course of the day two of my courses turned into ones only available through a Standard Timetable, but fortunately my little bit of planning allowed me to easily find the courses that I needed at different times.

So now I have a near perfect schedule (I hope) with all my courses going from 10:00-3:30 most days, with an hours lunch break. Taking all of my courses on Monday, Wednesday and Friday and doing labs e.t.c Tuesday, Thursday makes sense to me. After being through various educational systems around the world I find that a little bit everyday works better for me than 3 hours once a week. After taking a lot of 7:30 in the morning classes back in high school the idea of starting class at 10:00 seems structured enough, but quite leisurely at the same time. That said apparently you are not allowed to take more than 32 credits per Winter session if you are in the faculty of arts… so I ran into a bit of a hiccup when I was unable to register for Psyc 102 in term 2. Hopefully I will be able to figure out a way around this by the time term 2 comes, but seen as it is a course with about 400 people in it I am not too too worried about it filling up before then! I am only planning on taking 5 courses per term which according to most people is tough, but the normal thing to do…  I don’t see why my particular course load is adding up to more credits than expected….strangely enough science and engineering students have a higher credit limit. Engineering students must take 35 credits for their first year.

Another thing that I would highly recommend is going to see the academic advisors. Especially if you have never really though about going to university before… I think high school counsellors might help you with this kind of if you are in Grade 12, but seen as I was pursuing my dance career I did not receive (or care to receive) much information… As I am planning on doing the dual degree in Arts and Engineering I went to see both academic advisors in the Arts and Engineering departments. Armed with little but an inkling about what credits, course selections, even faculties or degrees themselves were all about, the academic advisors helped me sort out which path I should take. Mary Murphy in the engineering department was amazing and especially helpful in that she took the time to help me figure out which courses I could use to fulfill some of the first year engineering requirements. Thanks to her I basically have my next two years planned out as long as I keep my marks high enough to qualify for the dual degree program. For the first time in my life I feel like I have a “real plan” which is both comforting yet scary at the same time. I would really recommend going to see the academic advisors if you are at all unsure about whether the courses/programs you are planning on taking will work for you.

Now that I am relieved of the initial stress of course registration I am looking forward to my courses next year… although I am seriously dreading Chemistry ahhh. Good luck to everyone out there still doing their course registration! I hope that it goes smoothly for you. <3

UBC VISTA TIPS

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Argh, so I don’t know if any of you have experienced this extremely frustrating aspect of the discussion boards on vista. Every time you write up a decent chunk of text and press enter your formatting goes completely haywire! On top of that trying to work in the HTML editor really does not work!!!

Anyways so far I have found that the best way to get any type of formatting i.e. paragraphs, line breaks is to use plain and simple HTML code. Just tick the “use html” button at the bottom of the posting framey thing.

For a line break: type in <br>.

For an entire empty line: type in <p> at the beginning and </p> at the end.

For an indent: type in &nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp; to give you four empty spaces.

And if you are trying to insert a link try fiddling around with the html editor thing or you could try using: <a href=”put url here”> put the text you want to appear here</a>

Hope this helps… I am not really familiar with html at all, but at least I found a way to insert paragraphs into my posts! It worked for me and hopefully it might work for you!

Walking through the courtyard

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Walking through the courtyard in front of the Irving K. Barber library tonight got me thinking. It is always quiet in the summer evenings, peaceful even. Yet I can never shake off the idea that there is something eerie about the way the trees are all planted in perfect rows. Perfectly aligned they remind me of students, or perhaps society. The way in which we are all cultivated to grow in a certain way, in the precise spot we were involuntarily placed. We can never truly escape our roots, they grip us, hold us down to the ground. They are our lifeline. Even if we try to grow as tall as can be, we are human and therefore bound by our humanity.
I wonder if the people who planted those trees ever thought much about the pattern that they were placed in? And what that pattern would represent to the students who trudge past them day by day. For one thing I know that I would really like to see a little tree in there, one that doesn’t follow the grid pattern. I don’t know why exactly I would like to see that little tree, but I think that it would signify hope. That no matter where you are planted, you can still live, breathe and grow. <3

Excited?

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It is pretty strange for me to finally be in university! After taking two years off to pursue ballet with the Goh Ballet I am back on the academic path (to the relief of my parents, teachers, blah, blah). I have started by just taking one summer course… a little bit of a bummer seen as I was invited to go to China on tour with the Goh shortly after I registered and paid my fees for ASTU 150. I wish I was taking more courses this summer now that I am tied down to going to class.

Actually I do not mind the course one bit and I am quite glad that I am taking it before my full course load next year. It is only once a week for 3 hours and it is a class of 8 students (I am not kidding you, eight!). The building is really nice and the professor is really helpful.  I do feel quite stupid and uneducated whenever the other students are talking about movies/comics/books/political things that I have never heard of… didn’t grow up in North America and spent the last couple years of my life dedicated to dance :P. Also manage to feel quite naive whenever I speak in class… I have no idea what most university classes should be like and am therefore in my opinion slightly at a disadvantage!

So far I am a little bit perplexed as to why they like to make academic writing so complicated… I like to see the world as being accessible, adding words like epistemological, politico-aesthetic e.t.c. not only confuses people but it means that: a. the articles take much longer to read! b. not as many people will read what you are trying to say. c. some words are used so often that you have to wonder whether they can truly have meaning at all and whether the author is using them to prove a point… or whether they are just trying to sound intelligent. Also when you are writing in-class assignments and you keep having to rewrite extra long “nominal” phrases your hand does get a little tired …and it wastes ink… and it wastes trees!

That said I am a little nervous about course choices e.t.c for the fall semester. I have decided that I am perhaps not the best arts student… even if I have been a dancer and fully immersed in the arts for un vrai, vrai long time, part of me cannot take arts studies all that seriously. I walked past a classroom the other day where they were being lectured about fairies and felt extremely disappointed! How useful is that? By going to university I want to be learning about…well not about fairies.  So my plan going into university is to do the dual degree program in Arts (hopefully Cognitive Systems) and Engineering… something that is applicable and could possibly get me a real world job. That said we will have to see if I can deal with university level science courses. I have been working as a high school math tutor, and I have just done Bio and Physics 12 (99% in both! BC mark inflation to the extreme) in the last two months, but I have probably completely forgotten most of Chem 12… and Calc is just hanging in by a couple of threads. Also I am planning on taking CPSC 110 next year. Having absolutely no programming background I am frantically trying to make a little bit of sense out of the midterms e.t.c. posted online so that I have an idea of what I am getting myself into!

Anyways I am planning on taking a laissez faire attitude this year. If I am a complete failure in a certain area and do not care for it at all, I am not going to worry about it too much… right we’ll see how that goes. I’ll keep you updated! <3