I once read somewhere that the most intelligent people are the ones that procrastinate the most. Why not procrastinate? If you wait longer to study you will be older, and therefore wiser. =P As a chief procrastinator here is a list of my favorite ways to pass the time and effectively do nothing. *Unfortunately my computer has given up the ghost, which is making studying that much more difficult (I actually have to go out of my room to get internet). Which means that when I finally do get internet I spent a lot more time catching up on facebook and emails, than actually doing my work… eeek!

1. Go on Facebook

2. Check email

3. Check mailbox

4. Get food

5. Get more food

6. Decorate your room with paper snowflakes

7. Decide to go running

8. Get all ready to go running and then decide that you really need to study

9. Then get all your stuff together to go to the library

10. Decide to go for a run again

11. …Never end up at the library

12. Go buy groceries, snacks e.t.c. anything you might need to study properly

13. Invite all your friends over to bake cookies, collectively procrastinating is the best.

14. Watch a couple of Disney movies

15. Decide to sell your textbooks, spend some time figuring that out

16. Draw out a studying schedule

17. Fail to meet the demands of your studying schedule… redraw the studying schedule

18. Think about all the things that you will do once exams are over

19. Check out UBC Blogsquad

20. Look at Vista for a while

21. Calculate all of your potential marks for each course

22. Text some people, complaining about all your work

23. Go to sleep

24. Paint your nails

25. Make some hot chocolate

26. Look at youtube videos

27. Make Christmas lists!!!

28. Make a gingerbread house… eat the gingerbread house.

29. Write some emails to long lost friends

30. Write a blogpost =P

Once you have finally completed all of the things on this list, it is probably the day of your exam. You are probably wondering how on earth you managed to waste all the time you had set out of studying and are now are freaking out, trying to figure out if there is any way you can stop time, turn into someone else for the day, stop the exam from happening e.t.c. Don’t worry, in a couple of hours the exam will be over and guess what? After that you get to complete the procrastination cycle again!!!

Please feel free to add any of your favourite ways of procrastinating. We all know that there are people out there who need help with this essential life skill!

Bahahaha, I don’t really know how I feel about this. I feel prepared but unprepared at the same time. We’ll just have to see how everything goes =S

GOOD LUCK TO EVERYONE ELSE!!!

Last night I might have written one of the worst exams in my life. I thought my Computer Science and Math midterms went terribly, but really yesterday was no comparison. By the time the exam was over I was so depressed that gave up on eating dinner and went to bed at 11:00.

Perhaps my expectations were too high, usually I go into a midterm thinking that I am going to fail it, but I prepared myself for Chemistry (or so I thought 0_o). I memorized, memorized and memorized some more. I thought, “hey Chem 121 is kind of evil, they make you memorize the most useless type of things, but I will just go with it and do as they tell me to, whatever”.  I could draw all the orbitals, and all the graphs, I had memorized close to every single chemical reaction that popped up in Chapter 6 and made cue cards for pretty much everything. I had done practice midterms with relative ease and every question in the book. I was certain that I wasn’t going to fail and might have even had my mind set on getting over 90% this time around. Going into I felt semi- relaxed and fairly confident. I was kind of excited to finish my first round of midterm and pretty certain I would finish them on a high. However…

As soon as I got into the room I started to feel a little anxious. For one thing there were no left handed seats. Usually they fix this by putting a couple of left-handed chairs up at the front… but there were NO LEFT HANDED SEATS and they weren’t prepared to do anything about it. This made me feel fairly unsettled. The fact that the prof was having to shout at the top of her lungs to organize everybody started making me feel even worse. She was like a drill sergeant and scary. I started to feel like we were cattle in a herd. I started to feel stupid. I could feel my heart starting to beat a little quicker. Actually I was getting upset, I was losing focus. Then it was time to rip open our exams. I flipped through the pages and was feeling ok until I got to the last two 16 marks… and I wasn’t entirely sure how to deal with either of them. Xenon… a Xenon reaction??? I knew XePtF6 had been synthesized but didn’t have anything much else about Xenon memorized. That completely threw me off. I knew that I would lose 8 marks right there on the spot, I don’t think I even got part marks. So I decided to start with the stuff I knew for sure and started drawing orbitals, my hand was kind of jerky, I was so nervous. Scribble, scribble, scriblle. Melting points and boiling points. I get those confused too. Suddenly there were 20 minutes left had time to work on the last two questions. Sadly I don’t think I got either of them right and with that I am in severe danger of failing my first university exam. My mood went from an n=10 -> n=1 … or you know what, make that n=-1000. Like half the people I talked to I was so depressed after the midterm that I didn’t eat dinner. It was disappointing.

So just a tip for any Chem 121ers next year. Memorize the entire book inside out. There is one sentence in the last section of Chapter 6 that I didn’t memorize which cost me those 8 marks. If you want an A it might be useful to be able to recite the books of by heart, word by word, letter by letter. Seriously eat every single word and be prepared to regurgitate it at any time. Do NOT just memorize the concepts, the important reactions and think that you will do well, memorize every single word in the textbook no matter how useless it seems.  =/ Lesson learnt.

This is me after the midterm.

However on a positive note, Chemistry labs, while stressful are really fun. The actual course content is pretty interesting and most of the profs are great. + You get really cool demos in class.  Just don’t expect the midterms to go well, they are insanely hard.

For the last few weeks I have been sick stressed out, feeling awful e.t.c., but fortunately this week things have been the complete opposite. My Physics assignment was surprisingly short, and I had a Psych midterm which I think went all right. Other than that I got some good marks back and I finally had time to go running, dancing and socializing. I have been to Yoga, went out to see a ballet with my friends and… a lot of things. School kind of went on the back burner which I think was a good thing because I feel ready to start this week (well first I have to finish my math assignment that is due tomorrow). With my first set of midterms behind me I have one week off  and then they all start once again. Blech…

Anyways even though it is my first week without a midterm I still have a busy schedule as the CLASS conference is going on (!!!!!), I have a bunch of meetings, and I have assignments/ quizzes due every single day of this week! Some how when I decided to go to University I didn’t think it I would get this much homework (actually I didn’t think I would get any). And I certainly didn’t expect quizzes! I thought we would just have quizzes, midterms, finals and papers. Surprise, surprise, the homework never ends!!!

Anyways food for thought, there are about 15 girls in my 80 student Physics class… that is 18.75% (Engineering courses are also at  20% females 80% guys). Us girls are completely outnumbered in this class! This seems really wrong to me.

That said, last time I checked I think slightly more girls go to UBC than guys. Why are girls who are so prevalent in other faculties so underrepresented in these types of courses??

Right now I am not in my Computer Science lab. I feel a little guilty. I should be there, but I’m not.

This morning I woke up after 3 hours of sleep. I was coughing all night and intermittently having nightmares about Lewis dot diagrams. For the past two weeks I have been sick and steadily getting worse and worse. At 8:00 this morning I decided to phone the student health centre to make an appointment with a doctor (which is why I am not in my CSPC lab right this moment). The doctor gave me some medicine and sent me on my way… I really hope that this cough disappears soon!

As much as I was looking forward to it, Thanksgiving weekend was kind of awful. I couldn’t speak, couldn’t hear (very well) and couldn’t taste anything, so much for family fun = (. Over the weekend light headedness and sleep took over half the time that I had set aside to study/ do assignments which was irritating. Now I have an insane week ahead of me (and I thought last week was challenging).

That brings me on to my next point: Chemistry. Tomorrow we have the Chem. 121 midterm. A.k.a the midterm of death. It seems like everywhere I go people have their Chirps (Chemistry Integrated Resource Packages) out and are staring at them, trying to make some sense out of the information at hand. Ah, Chemistry, the bane of my current existence. I was feeling good about the midterm until I took the practice midterm yesterday. I legitimately scored 31/60 on that… oh dear… must study more, it seems like a lot of the material on the practice midterm was never covered in class (hmmm… I forgot, this is university). I also have a chemistry lab to do this week, a Physics assessment, a scary looking Physics assignment (I mean scaaarrry looking), I am tutoring someone for math 12, I have my own math homework, and I need to complete the computer science lab that I missed. That lab in itself is supposed to take about 24 hours!! When oh, when in my schedule am I ever going to find time to go to the Demco Learning Centre?

Errr, learning, right. I have also (writing this feeling incredibly grown up) scheduled myself to go to a couple of conferences this year! I have never ever been to a conference before and am already signed up for ICE (Interuniversity Conference on Education) on Saturday (Oct 5^th, more info and sign up here) and CLASS (Conference for Learning and Academic Student Success)(Oct 25^th-28^th registration is now open more info and sign up here) and well as one later in the year. As a student and math tutor I am really interested in the way math is taught/ how people learn/ the use of technology in education (good and bad) so I think that the conferences will be quite interesting.

Ok, back to my own learning again… Chemistry, why do I have to understand you?<3

p.s. good luck to everyone else out there taking the Chem 121 midterm tomorrow

p.p.s If during the midterm, you happen to be sitting beside a girl with a terrible, loud and distracting cough, chances are that it is me. Sorry in advance!

After my last class today a friend and I were wandering around the ICCS after hearing that our CPSC 110 exams had been marked and that we could pick them up in room #????. Neither of us remembered the room number so we spent some time walking around, and finally gave up on getting our exams. Just as we were about to head back I saw one of those “really cool rooms” at the end of a hallway that I immediately wanted to show my friend. I dragged my friend down the hallway to look at it. While we were staring down through the large glass window, two people came out and asked us if we wanted to take a look at the lab. It was awesome! Inside there were quite a lot of people working on computers and about the same amount of large robots. We got to meet a couple of graduate students who told us about their research as well as a couple of robots named “Betty, Roger, PR2” and possibly Daisy (I really can’t remember the names properly…tough week). According to the researchers one of the robots can catch balls which I think is amazing! I want a robot that can play catch! Also they introduced us to the PR2. It had arrived a little while ago and they had just started having fun with it (teaching it how to dance e.t.c.). This robot can play pool, and can even bring you beer! .

Soooo, if anyone wants a really cool tour I’d recommend that you hang out in the ICCS, just past the DEMCO learning centre. Also, if you are interested you can sign up to become a research participant for a Human-Robot interaction study by emailing calisgan@interchange.ubc.ca , more information is posted on their door.