The Final Stretch
It's been almost three months and I'm coming up to the end of this, my first semester at university. It's been a lot of pain and fun all rolled into one big mess. Many of my fears were proven to be unfounded while others have magnified in their seriousness. Let me give you some examples. I was never really a shy person back on PEI, but I wasn't the most outgoing person either. I was terribly afraid of not meeting anyone and making new friends here. Well that was proven completely wrong. I've never made so many friends. Perhaps it's due to the fact that we all feel basically the same and everyone's accepting, but nevertheless there's an awesome bunch here. On the other hand however is the matter of school materials and difficulty. Okay, I knew I was going to a good school with high academic standards. People told me expect a 10% drop in my average from high school. At this point, I'd be happy with only a 10% drop. I expected university to be hard, but I never had any inkling that I'd be getting kicked in the ass so hard. The initial trauma left me basically useless. Towards the end of this semester I picked things up and started organizing myself better. We'll see if it's good enough for the finals here.
Speaking of finals, I'm really in the final stretch now. We've finished up in all of our courses save for Calculus and we'll be finishing the very last bit of work to be covered tomorrow. Okay, I'll be honest, it was a weird feeling hearing the professor say 'Okay and that's the last material we'll be covering in this course'. I've moved through elementary school, junior high school and senior high school without this feeling save for upon Grade 9 and Grade 12 graduation. Moving from grade to grade didn't really mean anything. This was different though. Perhaps it marks the beginning of the end of my first stretch of a challenging academic and social life ahead of me. I have never worked as hard (and didn't really imagine I'd ever work as hard) as I have this past semester and I could definitely do better.
I finished my last bit of regular classwork this evening. A couple of us got together and worked on our C# programming assignment. The program we had to write included things such as reading in a data file of 20 000 different cars, writing methods for finding certain makes of cars, deleting specific ones, and sorting the entire list in order of price. The concepts weren't too difficult at all, however the implementation was pretty much death in a program. There were so many ways to go wrong, not just in syntax but in logic as well. It's hard to wrap your mind around every single possibility that the program could possibly run into. But since I've finished that up (not even due until Monday!) I've got a clean slate until exams start next Thursday. It's a nice feeling to know that you can concentrate on studying. Plus since we're in 1A, the first year office was nice enough to plan our exams so that we have them every second day. Our 5 exams are spread out over more than a week. My first one is Physics and the second is ECE (programming). Those are definitely going to interesting and an awful way to start of the finals.
So yes... See? I'm super busy and yet I still find time to post something to my blog. What are you people doing out there? Where's your update? I'm patiently waiting. =P
Speaking of finals, I'm really in the final stretch now. We've finished up in all of our courses save for Calculus and we'll be finishing the very last bit of work to be covered tomorrow. Okay, I'll be honest, it was a weird feeling hearing the professor say 'Okay and that's the last material we'll be covering in this course'. I've moved through elementary school, junior high school and senior high school without this feeling save for upon Grade 9 and Grade 12 graduation. Moving from grade to grade didn't really mean anything. This was different though. Perhaps it marks the beginning of the end of my first stretch of a challenging academic and social life ahead of me. I have never worked as hard (and didn't really imagine I'd ever work as hard) as I have this past semester and I could definitely do better.
I finished my last bit of regular classwork this evening. A couple of us got together and worked on our C# programming assignment. The program we had to write included things such as reading in a data file of 20 000 different cars, writing methods for finding certain makes of cars, deleting specific ones, and sorting the entire list in order of price. The concepts weren't too difficult at all, however the implementation was pretty much death in a program. There were so many ways to go wrong, not just in syntax but in logic as well. It's hard to wrap your mind around every single possibility that the program could possibly run into. But since I've finished that up (not even due until Monday!) I've got a clean slate until exams start next Thursday. It's a nice feeling to know that you can concentrate on studying. Plus since we're in 1A, the first year office was nice enough to plan our exams so that we have them every second day. Our 5 exams are spread out over more than a week. My first one is Physics and the second is ECE (programming). Those are definitely going to interesting and an awful way to start of the finals.
So yes... See? I'm super busy and yet I still find time to post something to my blog. What are you people doing out there? Where's your update? I'm patiently waiting. =P
This entry was posted
on Friday, December 02, 2005 at 12/02/2005 01:28:00 a.m..
You can skip to the end and leave a response.
» Post a Comment