An Apple A Day Won't Keep This Dr. Away

[K.Smithy]

~Nearing the End~

Exams are coming around quickly and things seem to not be getting any less hectic.

Course Update

PHYS1002
We are on to module 3 and I'm loving it. Module 3 is the modern physics component of the course - relativity, quantum mechanics, etc. It is the part of the course that allows me to watch Interstellar (which, fun fact, is my favourite movie btw) and convince myself its for "study purposes".
I HAVE MAJOR NEWS!!!! I got a 7 in my second lab report  I am beyond happy. This, honestly, feels so amazing. To have gone from scraping passes (and even failing one lab) last semester, to getting a 7!!!! It feels incredible!!!
In less happy news... I got a 5.5 in my second assignment  For reference, I got two 6s and a 7 last semester for the assignments. And so far, I've got a 5 and a 5.5... I feel quite defeated. I put a lot more time and effort into the second assignment than I did the first and I only improved by 0.5. To put it in perspective, my first assignment was only 7 pages long, my second was 21 pages long... The annoying thing is, I checked the feedback and I had pretty much everything correct. I was getting docked a lot of marks for stupid things like not specifying the direction of the current in a wire - even though the answer I got in the end was still correct  Oh well... I have the next assignment, I'm aiming for a 7 so my average grade for the assignments makes me less sad...
Assessment: I have my third and final lab report due Tuesday. I have almost finished it. I think it is pretty good and I've taken the same structure that I used for the second lab report, so if I can get another 7 I may shed some tears of joy. I also have the third and final assignment now, its on relativity (which I think is my strong-suit for this course, so we're aiming high to try and fix my average).

MATH1051
This course is still lots of fun - even though it's kind of kicking my butt. The midsem = terrible, assignments = not terrible, but not fantastic.... The final is two weeks away so I will be studying hard. I'm aiming for a 6 in this course, so fingers crossed...
Assessment: All assessment has been finished. I should get my results for the 4th assignment on Monday. And from now on its all exam prep for me.

SCIE1200
Weird, weird course. I got a 7 in the second assignment, which was an abstract writing and scientific figure critiquing task. I'm pretty proud of that, given that I was out at a party the night before and wrote a good chunk of it the day it was due ahaha. Girl boss moment. I'm still awaiting my results for the group assignment, and the second set of individual seminar summaries. I'm hoping it goes well because I am aiming for a 7 in this course but am not confident the final report will be great. I need to bank as many marks as I can now, so I can worry less about the final.
Assessment: I have a presentation tomorrow on why we can't use qubits to approximate harmonic oscillators. I still have no clue how it works, but thankfully the presentation isn't assessed. I still have a few weeks to write the report, fingers crossed it goes well.

STAT1301
I am streeeeesssssed. I submitted an ethics review a few weeks ago, so I am still awaiting my result for that. I am confident that I didn't do terribly so fingers crossed. I am incredibly stressed about the final which is in three weeks time as I wouldn't be able to answer a single question asked about the content as this current moment. So, surely I can cram 13 weeks of knowledge into my brain in 3 weeks... Surely.
Assessment: I am currently working on my research report which is due tomorrow. I have no clue what I'm doing  I only have 800 words to work with which is proving difficult. We'll see how it goes. At the moment, it is pretty much finished, I just need to add a conclusion and then cut a whole heap of words.

General Life Update

Tutoring and all the other work I do is going well. My yr12 bio student has their external next week (I'm fairly certain), so we've been spending the past few weeks working through practice exams in our lessons. I'm confident they will do well, but am a little sad that I will have to say goodbye after our next lesson.

To-do list:

• Finish notes for STAT
• Finish report for STAT

• Start practice questions for STAT
• Finish lab report for PHYS

• Start assignment for PHYS
• Do readings for PHYS
• Module 1 review for PHYS
• Do vectors quizzes for MATH
• Do matrices quizzes for MATH
• Start practice exams for MATH
• Work on report for SCIE

• Write article for AoS

• Write physics lesson for AoS

[K.Smithy]

~Semester Two Done and Dusted~

So, there goes another eventful semester. God, time goes so quick once you leave highschool! To think I should have finished my degree in only three more years 
This semester was so hectic, but fun, but hectic, and I'm tired and want to sleep but I now have to start the summer semester 

Course Update

PHYS1002
I did it! I got a 7 on the third lab and third assignment  y'all are in the midst of an Einstein. The exam was cooked though, it was so bad. Every past paper I did was horrible, so I knew I was screwed for this exam. In the past, there would be 6 questions on the exam and you would choose four to answer, but this year we had to answer all 6 in the same amount of time I opened the test and only knew how to do one of them. I only ended up answering four questions, though I'm sure my answers are wrong for 3 of them  turns out everyone felt the same though, so at least I'm not alone.
After talking to some older students who have taken this course before, I am feeling more confident about the next few years. They said that 1002 is the worst physics course, final exam-wise and that future courses get much better. So that's reassuring.

MATH1051
I ended up with 20/20 on the last assignment  The final exam was also significantly better than the midsem. Like I opened it and knew how to answer stuff  There were a few questions in the calculus section that stumped me - I stupidly forgot to change dx to d(theta) in a trig sub, so I couldn't actually solve the integral in one question lol. They also never showed us how to figure out what to sub in for a trig sub, they always just told us what to sub in but this time they didn't. Thankfully, I watched a Nancy Pi video on it the night before so I knew what to sub in. Didn't remember to change dx tho  I also can't do Maclaurin series for some reason. Like, I get how they work and what we're meant to do to find them but every time I do it it goes wildly wrong??? Idk what I'm doing wrong lol. So I definitely got that question wrong.
But the linear algebra section was super easy so yay.

SCIE1200
The group assignment went alright. I was hoping for better but it is what it is. For a 7 overall, I need 87% on the final report - which I think is doable. So, fingers crossed!

STAT1301
My ethics review went alright and so did my report. The final was so much easier than I expected. There were five questions and I struggled with the first two because I'm really bad at probability. But I answered them. I just know that there are lots of mistake (I did know the general process for solving those questions though, so hopefully that shows in my working). The last three questions were good. I'm much better at statistics than I am probability, so they weren't too bad. I did stuff up one question though. They gave a linear regression model and we had to provide an estimate based on some parameters and stuff. I got a whacky number, and I knew the regression had been log-transformed but stupidly I forgot base e was a thing lol. So I tried base 10 and got some really whacky number and was like "Oh well". It was only after walking out of the exam that I was like "Whoops, base e is a thing that exists". But that's ok.

General Life Update

I had a job interview on Thursday for Elevate Education, so hopefully that goes well. A lot of my writing stuff will be finished come the start of semester 1 next year. This is a blessing and a curse. It's great because it gives me more time for study (I truly struggled with balancing everything this semester), but it sucks because I also need money so I can afford to go to uni lol. So, hopefully I get the Elevate gig.
I have a week long break before I start the summer semester. I am taking MATH1052 as well as PSYC1030. Should be fun. Unfortunately, I have to go to a 2 day conference next week for a leadership program, so two days of my break are gone  I'll also be spending the other days getting back into writing for work. So not much of a break .

[K.Smithy]

~Second year coming through  ~

So, second semester didn't go fantastic grade wise. I just scraped by the hurdle on the PHYS1002 final (I mildly failed the exam with a 3.3  , but managed a 5 overall???). I made a lot of silly mistakes on the MATH1051 and STAT1301 finals, which meant I missed out on a 6 in those courses by just a few percent    Though, I do feel pretty alright with getting a 5 in 1051 given that over half of the cohort failed the course overall and it has one of the highest fail rates of all UQ courses. So, I can't beat myself up too much. I did, thankfully, end up with a 7 in SCIE1200 so that was pretty good. The final report was difficult but interesting.

I just finished up my summer semester like a week ago. I think it went quite well. I really, really enjoyed MATH1052. I think I learnt so much in that course (it was a lot nicer than 1051, that's for sure). I enjoyed ODEs so much and I also really enjoyed the multivariate calculus. I don't think there was anything that I didn't really understand in the course. That being said, I panicked big time before the final and wasted like 20 minutes of the exam freaking out because I wanted to do really well. Most of the exam was super easy and straight forward. There were a few questions that I got a bit stuck on (e.g., we had to do some implicit differentiation for a second degree differential with the -Fx/Fy formula thing... had no clue how to do it). Because I was ~panicking~ I made a lot of small mistakes that made some questions impossible to solve. For example, I integrated P^-1/2 as ln(P^1/2)  Instead of -2P^-3/2. I realised my mistake once I walked out. I couldn't figure out why the second part of the question was unsolvable ahahah. That was why.
I was hoping for a 7 in the course and was at 99.56% overall going into the exam, so I was feeling hopeful. But there was an 80% hurdle on the exam for a 7 overall in the course. So I'm scared I made too many mistakes to get an 80%. Though I'm certain I got at least a 6 overall.

PSYC1030 went really well. Final grades haven't been released yet but I know enough of my results to deduce that I got a 7 overall. Happy days. I'm awaiting one more written response, but the best 2 of 3 are counted and I got 10/10 on the first and 9/10 on the second. I do have a feeling that I did better on the third tho, so I guess we'll see (not that it matters really). I also got 68/70 on the lab report which was cool  So looks like I'm just a lab report genius in both physics and psychology now ahaha.

Semester One, 2022

I am feeling more hopeful about this coming semester. I've had a look at the blackboards for all of my courses and there is already way more physics resources available in one of my physics courses than there was in 1001 and 1002 combined.

This semester, I will be taking:
PHYS2955: Advanced Fields in Physics I. I am nervous because this is the first time this course is running. So I don't really know what to expect. I also don't know how different it'll be from it's non-advanced counterpart PHYS2055. But I guess only time will tell...

PHYS2020: Thermodynamics and Condensed Matter Physics. This course has a million resources!!!! I am super excited!!! The one thing I really didn't like about 1001 and 1002 is that there were no resources and no support. I had no clue what I was doing or where to go for practice questions. We had access to past exams but no solutions to those exams... Like, what am I meant to do with that??? In 2020 we get a whole booklet of practice problems to work through. We get a lecture workbook with all of the lecture question. We also get tutorial sheet questions every week. We get past exams WITH solutions. We also have access to a tonne(!!!!) of online resources they've made for us (e.g., topic summaries). I am feeling a lot more confident about how my journey through physics will go now.

MATH2001: Calculus and Linear Algebra II. So.... this is the second part to MATH1051  I'm not looking forward to it, but I think I will be ok. I learnt over summer that keeping up with the tut sheets and actually attending tutorials is really helpful  So I intend on doing that. I am nervous about the 70% final though.

NEUR2020: Neuroscience for Psychologists. Not nervous for this course, I think it will be fine. Got nothing really to say about it ahaha.

Work life

I have almost finished up all of the writing things I need to do (currently procrastinating two physics lessons as we speak ahaha - they're almost finished tho so its ok). By midsem break I should have everything finished and I'll be down to just tutoring. I have two year 12 physics students this year, and one year 12 bio student. I've done 3-4 lessons with them all so far and they're just super lovely and I really enjoy our classes. Physics has been a joy to tutor and its so fun actually knowing what to do in physics 


Anywho, that's all for this update! I have two lessons to finish off and then a toga party to get ready for so  Until next time!
I hope you're all doing well,
Katelyn

[K.Smithy]

~Unexpected events have occurred~

So... some of you may be aware of the current happenings in South East Queensland (particularly in the Brisbane area). For those who aren't aware, there has been major flooding throughout SEQ. Days of heavy rain, mixed with a rising Brisbane river, king tides, and major dams being over capacity, have resulted in major flooding. The flood levels are close to what they were in 2011 in many areas and while the days of rain have finally come to an end, the dam has once again gone above capacity and needs to be released for I think the third or fourth time in the last few days - combine this with the king tide expected today and it is incredibly likely that the water levels will continue to rise over the coming days.

I was hanging out with a friend in Brisbane on Thursday (the day the rain started) and have since been trapped at their house. I haven't seen my family since 6:30am on Thursday and don't know how long it will be until I see them next. My friend's family have been so welcoming and I honestly couldn't thank them enough for keeping me safe. The highway and surrounding roads that I would need to drive on to get home have been severely flooded and are now inaccessible.

My university has been hit pretty bad. There will be major clean up work needing to be done once the flooding subsides. The central library flooded only a couple of years ago and was reopened at the beginning of last year. It is likely that it has probably flooded again and will need to be renovated once again. So, needless to say, uni won't be happening for a bit. I know for certain that I will have no classes today, tomorrow, and Wednesday (even online classes have been cancelled), and it is likely that we will soon hear that Thursday and Friday classes will be cancelled.

Anywho, that is my update for now. I will take this as an opportunity to get more work done and to maybe get a head start on some of the work for the weeks ahead.

I hope all of those who live around the affected areas are doing well and keeping safe. Remember, if it's flooded, forget it.