Tag Archives: UBC

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!

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

First Post

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… hmmm after all the experience I have had with blogger this looks like it will take a little time to get used to!

Like many first year students I have decided to document my thoughts online to try and make a little more sense of the world (or perhaps a little more nonsense in the world)… I know, just another first year blog on just another ubc website, but I have found other blogs here extremely useful in figuring out just exactly what I will be doing this year and where I will be going with it all…

So hopefully one day it might be useful to someone out there doing the same thing, sifting through cyberspace in the dark hours of the night. Trying to make sense of everything after being handed the license to complicate.