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