Hope everyone is having a wonderful winter break!

I haven’t blogged in a while so I decided to write briefly about the courses I took this semester. I hope this will help some people out!

Economics 101

This course can be pretty interesting depending on the professor. My prof was very friendly however I found myself falling asleep quite a few times. Some caffeine did help me survive the afternoon class though! The textbook is pretty straightforward and is helpful when trying to understand concepts along with your lecture notes. There is math in this course but it is very basic math. Unfortunately if you never learned a formula to calculate something in class and it’s not in the textbook, it may appear on mid-terms or the final exam and that’s how you can get screwed over. If you do plan to take this course don’t slack off because trying to understand and memorize all the concepts with little time before your first mid-term is not a good idea. Some profs are harder than others, I was nervous for my two mid-terms and final exam even though my prof might be considered a little bit easier than a couple of the other ones. But I wasn’t the only one who was nervous.

In my opinion this isn’t a easy, GPA-boosting course. But it can be useful to understand the basics of the world of economics.

Words 150

This was one of my easier classes

In my opinion his mandatory course for Arts students is very useful. You learn to do things such as learning how to write research papers and analyze scholarly articles, which is something you will likely have to do in the future. Be prepared to read at least one 15-30 page scholarly article on a weekly basis, along with textbook readings and assignments. This course can have a heavy workload depending on the professor. I was lucky enough to have a prof that did not assign loads of assignments. It can be boring if your prof isn’t great so if you can choose your professor be sure to check out ratemyprofessors.com before registering for a class. My prof was friendly, helpful, and gave us a very straightforward mid-term and final exam.

EOSC 114 – Natural Disasters

I took this course online because I heard it was a easy elective and there wasn’t any room to take it on campus.

Within a month I realized it was NOT that easy. WHYYY

A lot of the questions on the quizzes required further/deeper thinking since they were all open book. I’ve also heard rumours that they’ve made this course harder than previous years.

It was kinda interesting in the beginning but then it became very boring. Earthquakes and volcanoes are cool but when the course moved to the units about storms, waves, tsunamis, meteor impacts, I was not engaged at all. But if you like that stuff then you should totally take this course! This course is mostly just memorization with a little bit of simple math, but you’re given all the formulas so don’t worry about that. I don’t even remember there being any math in the final exam! The final exam was a lot better than I expected and the group portion helped my mark a lot. Yay for teamwork!

Maybe this course is more interesting in person since a couple of my friends who took it on campus enjoyed it.

Math 110

This is a full year course, so it moves at a good pace for those who aren’t that strong in math or don’t want to stress too much over math. The textbook is useless and the workshops are pretty pointless in my opinion. Webwork can be a pain if you leave it all for the weekend so try to get some questions done during the week. The course uses this really helpful program called Piazza where you can ask the instructors and other people taking the course for help on homework and Webwork questions. And Webwork questions tend to be very similar so you can work on it with your friends

I’m in the middle of taking this course so I’ll have a better review at the end of next term. The mid-terms have been okayish but hard questions have shown up. 

Enjoy the rest of your break everyone!