Category: Academics

In high school, my teachers always told me how they all try to work together to connect all the subjects and I just didn’t see that. How in the world does Hamlet connect to the velocity of a train? Or even chemistry with math, I mean you use math in chemistry, but nothing more than multiplication. And then there’s calculus. I hated calculus with the passion of a thousand burning suns and it is one of the reasons why I am not in engineering right now. I despised Newton for ever thinking of calculus and wished that apple never fell on his head. I felt like, in real life, if I want to know how long it will take a potato to go from room temperature to x degrees  in an oven set to y degrees, I will wait for the stupid potato to warm up! But now as a “wiser” university student, I see how various courses are related.

• PHYS 100 and calculus – We had a clicker question about if a car has a linear position-vs-time graph and if a train has a what looked like a log position-vs-time graph and they intersected twice, then do they ever have the same velocity? I looked at it and just remembered what I believe was the mean value theorem where f(x) and g(x) are continuous on the closed interval [a, b] and differentiable on the open interval (a, b) then there is a c on (a, b) where the derivatives of f(x) and g(x) are the same. Or something along those lines. Either way, I looked at the graph and just saw that theorem, whatever it was, pop in my head and all those people who didn’t know it had to think about it for a long time.

• PSYC 100 and art – This one is a really odd one for me to talk about. I took an introductory course in visual art in high school and I thought I would never use it again outside of drawing on calculus AP test review questions. In the last section in PSYC 100, we learned about the various brain structures and he would often put pictures of them up on the projector and I drew them quite well in my notes given the short amount of time before he moved on, which I can fully thank last year’s art class for.

• PHYS 100, CHEM 111, PSYC 100, and EOSC 114 – Not as exciting, but I found it interesting that in four out of my five classes we ended up talking in some depth about waves, mostly light waves, some sound waves, and some actual waves (the kind in the ocean).

• ENGL 110 and Monty Python and the Holy Grail – Surprisingly, this one is not incidental, he has done it on several different occasions. Since each ENGL 110 class is different, I can’t exactly recommend watching the movie for the class, but it is a lovely movie nonetheless. Today he referenced the part where the bridgekeeper asked them three questions: What is your name? What is your quest? What is your favourite colour? and it surprisingly was entirely relevant to what we were talking about.

Says my Skype as I load it on my Mac. (I’ve noticed it doesn’t do that on PCs, weird, eh?)

And that is definitely something I need. Midterms are getting to me and they never stop and when I say never I mean that I have 9 midterms, a final project, and a final essay, which is due on the last day of classes. Sadly, unlike high school, final project/essay does not equal no final during exam time. So how have I been dealing with the last 6 midterms and will most likely continue with the next 3?

I don’t run on caffeine and I can’t because it hurts my stomach. Therefore, I rely on the junk food mentioned in my last post and pure motivation to get everything done. My motivation reserves have reached a critical level though, so I’ve been doing only the bare minimum.

For EOSC, I haven’t read any of the last 3 chapters in order to answer the questions on Vista, I just skim through them and look for the answers, telling myself that I’ll go back and read the chapters when I have more time, but I still have a gut feeling that that will never happen.

For PSYC, I have a midterm on Thursday that is on the lectures and the textbook that I have just started reading about an hour ago. 87 out of 100 pages to go and I don’t think I’ll make it, which will probably result in me only reading the summaries and praying that the test is not too hard.

For CHEM, the day that I do my lab report is being pushed later and later into the week.

For ENGL, I found one story for last week as an audio book and I read a summary of the other. This week, I managed to read the first one (it was actually more interesting than I thought it would be), but I’m not sure I can get around to reading the second one (I might have already read it in high school, I can’t exactly remember).

And I don’t really have anything to say about PHYS, it’s not too time consuming and not too difficult either, but it is far from easy. There’s a fine line in that class between total understanding and total confusion, I haven’t found much room in between, but luckily it’s been more on the side of total understanding.

The midterms themselves range from being quite difficult to pretty easy, here’s my grades that I’ve gotten back so far: 66, 78, 86, 96, 100, so they really are pretty much everywhere. In order to study for them, for each one in science, I usually go through the same general process of reviewing notes, creating a summary sheet, and doing the practice midterm. For PSYC, I ended up reading the text in the week prior to the exam and then reviewed my in class notes on the day of the exam.

It probably wouldn’t be so bad if I didn’t totally fail at balancing fun and work (and this sun setting really, really early deal is not helping either). Similar to what Rabi said, when I’m not working, I’m bored. When I go home for Christmas, I will definitely be bringing my 360 and a huge collection of games to keep myself occupied.

From the perspective of a science student.

We will call him John because arts students are pretty generic and they’re everywhere. John wakes up at 10 every morning to go to his creative writing class, which starts at 12. Then, he takes a 2 hour break and goes to his music class. After that, he meets up with some friends and they go to the beach. They go downtown for dinner, come back and party until 2 AM when they go to sleep and repeat the process. There’s no need for him to read or study since his classes are so easy and they never assign anything. And he doesn’t have any extra part to his classes like labs or tutorials, maybe a discussion group where they actually just talk about what they’re thinking and half of the class thinks that your random thought is entirely brilliant.

I wish I was John and I’m sure a bunch of arts students do too.

Now for the life of a science student…from the perspective of said science student.