(Star) Trekking My Way to Space - Olivia's Uni Journal

[owidjaja]

Hey guys,

Once again, it's been so long since I've updated this journal 😅Now that some of my classes are moved to online, I have a chance to update this journal. Holidays weren't very eventful, but more like depressing for me. Ever since I got my marks back, I was crying myself to sleep for a good month, partially because of how bad my marks are, and the other part was because I couldn't go to the cruise because I had to sit a supplementary exam. It was kinda depressing to be home alone for two weeks, especially since I was stressing over supplementary exams, but two of my friends drove to my house just to keep me company for a few hours. While I was sad throughout January, I was able to pass my supplementary exams. But this also meant that all my plans (e.g. current writing project, society preparation) are behind schedule. I'm glad that insurance was able to return the money for the cruise, but now I'm entering T1 tired and sad.

The good thing is that I've started to get professional help. I've started meeting a psychologist once a fortnight at Headspace to help me deal with anxiety, or at least not bottle up my emotions (because I suck at emotions rip). I've also decided to reduce my workload per term and extend my degree for a year because 3 courses a term is extremely overwhelming. Assuming that I don't fail anymore courses, I could finish my degree in 5 years. So in T1, I'm taking thermodynamics and Electrical and Telecommunications Engineering.

For elec, I have the same lecturer, which is a good thing because she's really nice and gives us a lot of resources. In fact, she's also my tutor, which means it's easier for me to ask for a consultation with her and also reduces my anxiety when asking for help. Because I've dropped down to 2 courses, this also means that I have more time to do more practice questions, which is what I'm finding so far. I'm actually able to complete the Online Tutorial questions and the Supplementary Material Questions. As for the labs, unfortunately my course doesn't offer lab exemption even though I passed the lab exam so I'll have to re-do them again. The only good thing is that now I know what's going on in labs, I can improve my mark (well, at least before the COVID-19 outbreak).

For thermo, my lecturer is your typical Boomer. He's very defensive, especially when we point out that he made a mistake in his derivations. He also LOVES derivations. While I do see that derivations are important, it's also ridiculous that he spent the first two weeks deriving equations, and barely does example questions, yet also expects us to complete tutorial problems. His instructions are also very confusing, especially since he told us to not look at our uni timetable for our labs and tutes (or he calls them consultations) and just follow his instructions, but his instructions aren't clear. My tutor also doesn't help that much either. When we ask for help, he just writes some formulas on the whiteboard without explaining anything and tells us to sub in the values. We also don't get detailed solutions for these tutorial problems (even if we ask for help) so I guess thermo is screwed.

Outside of classes, my society is trying to get re-organised. It's a bit difficult because we're also trying to adjust with online classes now, but we don't really have any online events planned - some were just brief ideas tossed out in the open but we haven't ironed out the logistics. I feel like not a lot of people like the transition to online classes, but I personally like them. I actually have more time to do things, like exercising in the morning, spend more time doing practice questions and even complete my writing project. I just hope that if we do online exams, they're take home exams that we submit 24 hours later because I saw how Monash is implementing eExams and it looks ridiculously intrusive (apparently UNSW has started using this system in the summer and now I'm freaked out).

Anyway, I should go and catch up with my lectures.

See you soon!

- Olivia

[owidjaja]

Hey guys,

So it's been over a month since I've updated my journal so I've decided to revive it again, for the umpteenth time.

To be honest, nothing much has been happening since the last time I've updated the journal. I've just been rolling along with online classes. My ELEC class did a great job in transitioning to online classes. They're even able to make the labs online, which is really cool. My thermo class though, did a poor job in transitioning to online. Firstly, my lecturer would usually go to uni to teach so he could use the lecture recording system (i.e. Echo) but because that website shut down he's just been uploading PDFs of his lecture notes and a powerpoint presentation with a voice recording attached to talk us through the notes (mind you, he doesn't even make lecture slides and writes them on a piece of paper and projects it on a document camera). So over the past month, we've had no lectures whatsoever. Not even Zoom classes. We don't even have tutorial classes. They just tell us to go onto Moodle and the tutors will be on the forums but all of this isn't the same as being taught in an online class. Guess who's getting a scathing review on the feedback surveys?

I've also been using this time to upskill and do some extra online courses. I've completed two courses on Matlab to use them for machine learning and deep learning, and I also did one on infection control training for COVID-19 (they recommend this for health care workers but it doesn't hurt to do it). I also did an online course on report writing for engineers and am currently completing three courses: flight mechanics, structural dynamics and data analysis. Unfortunately, some of these require payment to get a certificate and I'm too poor to pay $100 on a certificate so I might as well do it for free.

I've also been a bit busy doing AIAA work. We've been working on converting events online, but our big online event was our Online Speaker Series. I basically pulled all the contacts I know and asked them if they'd like to come onto our livestream. It was kinda awkward for me to be on camera and speak to a virtual live audience but I'm slowly getting better in terms of speaking. We had a few technical difficulties yesterday but it was interesting to see how OBS works. In fact, it's really cool to see how Youtubers add overlays when streaming and I'm excited that we could replicate that kind of experience with our speaker series.

Over the past few weeks, I've been doing a lot of research on different companies and their internship program. While they usually recommend students to do work experience in 3rd of 4th year, my anxiety stems from the fact that I don't even have a credit average, which is a standard requirement for a lot of internship programs, which is why I've just been asking my contacts for advice to make sure that even if I don't meet that requirement, I can fulfil other requirements such as being able to work in a team, interpersonal communication skills etc. And also, these programs usually wants students in their penultimate year but I'm just gonna apply regardless lol.

Anyway, I should go back to studying since my exams are in like 3 days lol.

See you soon!

- Olivia

[Bri MT]

Sucks that your classes seem to have done a really bad job at transitioning online. Online presentation does feel different but I've found it gets better with practice - I guess we'll all have time to build our skills this sem.

Those courses sound really interesting! I only know the absolute basics of how machine learning works but definitely something intriguing to learn about.

I don't have any doubts at all about you being able to work in a team, communicate well etc. and I'm sure you have plenty of evidence of this so hopefully that's able to make up for marks, especially since stem communication is so valued.

Best of luck for your exams!

[owidjaja]

Hey guys,

Oh wow look at this, me updating again after a month or so lol.

It's been a busy month. So I made the decision early in the year that I'll try 2 courses a term to see how we go and I managed to pass all my courses in T1! For the first time, I passed all my courses which is probably a bit of a yikes 😅 Anyway, I decided to do 3 courses this term because I wanted to use the online learning to my advantage. I prefer online classes over face to face classes so hopefully I pass all of my courses this term again. This term, I'm taking ENGG1811, ENGG2400 and PSYC1001.

With ENGG1811, it's Python programming course so I can satisfy the programming part of my degree. I did COMP1511 last year and failed that and Python's a lot easier than C so hopefully it goes well this term. As usual, I'm always a bit nervous in programming because it's such a different way of thinking, and also lowkey scarred from programming after doing COMP1511. At the moment, it seems ok but I'm just waiting for everything to crash and burn lol.

As for ENGG2400, I'm nervous about this subject (no surprise here lol). This is the part two for ENGG1300, which I almost failed but somehow managed to pass the impromptu supplementary exam. These exams are ridiculously hard and they barely give us time to finish. Even during my Block Test, which I had two days ago, was such a big yikes because they gave us 1 hour (which is usually 45 minutes in real life) to answer 3 questions. 3 questions don't sound too bad until you see that each question has 5 parts and each part takes up minimum half a page of working out 🙃 My ENGG2400 lecturer is the same as my ENGG1300 lecturer, which is good because he gives a lot of resources and makes life easier to navigate on Teams (even though he's probably sponsored by Microsoft lol).

I'm also taking PSYC1001 this term. This is because I keep thinking about picking up a science degree and major in psychology for the past year. It's funny because these thoughts started when my friend (who does neuroscience and aerospace) gave me her thoughts on double degrees and how it allows her to do a degree where it seems a lot more "practical" in finding a job and another degree where it may be a bit more difficult to find a job but at least she enjoys it. It really got me thinking because as much as I love aerospace, it's clear that I'm also interested in other areas (I mean, look at my HSC marks. I did better in Humanities than math and physics lol). The reason why I was thinking of psychology was because it's quite similar to what I did in Society & Culture, which covers a lot of psychology topics. At this stage, I kinda regret not picking up a double in engineering and science since it was 2nd on my UAC preferences. I didn't put it first because my physics teacher said doing a double degree makes you look like you don't have a clear career path - and this was me asking about doing a double in engineering and physics. Little did I know that I'm meeting people in uni who are doing philosophy and engineering, or neuroscience and engineering. Now I regret listening to him because doing an internal program transfer is going to be a bit difficult for me because I don't meet the WAM cut off :/ Hopefully my PSYC marks can help my WAM a bit this term because I'm really enjoying it at the moment.

Apart from that, the other thing I mentioned in my previous update was about my worries over an internship (or not finding one). Now, I think I found an internship opportunity? It's unclear at this point. My mentor introduced me to the lead astrodynamics person at Electro Optic Systems (EOS) because I'm interested in space situational awareness/space debris and he's keen on the idea of internships but it's been almost 2 weeks since I sent him an email detailing my interests in space debris and my probably lack of skills in programming/software development. I really hope I didn't screw up this opportunity because this basically involves me working on an area I'm passionate it and I'd hate to hear that this internship wouldn't be able to work out because I'm under-qualified.

Anyway, this was a bit of an update on what I've been doing the past few months. Next time, I'll try to not update once a month lol 😅

See you soon!

- Olivia