The End of Another Era

The two people who follow this blog the most are probably going to be pretty upset or really blaze (with an accentuated “e”) with me about this.

Once again, I’ve decided to stop blogging.  I don’t really come on here that much to post, and I really prefer reading my friends’ blog posts rather than posting my own. Besides, hanging onto a thread with this blog is really killing my time. Other than that, I’ve noticed that this blog has been very depressing despite what I usually write and feel. That’s negativity that I just don’t need to experience; my usual life style seems to have slipped a bit from the happy-go-lucky type. (My friends are probably remembering high school and scratching their heads a bit right now, but you know it’s true to some extent!  For these reasons, I feel that this blog has been tortured and exhausted to its fullest, and so have decided to close it, like many before.

I’ll probably start blogging again later on, but it’ll be less personal. I really don’t think anyone is interested in my life.

You know it’s true.

It’s funny to think that I actually started blogging purely by inspiration from another blogger, who is now just trying to relax and complete a degree at USYD. I wish her luck for the rest of her life, and hope she’s doing better at uni than I am.

So..

So

 

Elation

I talked to one of my lecturers today, I feel great now. Their style is deceptive, it seems.

Truly False Confidence?

Today I had a thermodynamics test, which apparently is extremely hard to pass. On average, the fail rate is something like 70%, so I decided that I would try my best to do all the tute questions in preparation for this demon. The problem is, I had this strange feeling that I would be fairly unprepared, so I just overrided that with an intense feeling of confidence (to give you an example, I almost belly flashed my lecturer by accident in glee). I went into the exam and my strategy actually worked and I aced it.

Well, I wish it went that way.

See, during my psychological adventure, I also fuelled my body with some mars bars every half hour, 2 hours before the exam. This sugar high added to my anticipation and stress and really made it hard for me to concentrate, not to mention the secondary rush of endorphins from the extra confidence. Since there was no formula sheet, I fumbled around with my paper trying to solve problems through dimensional analysis. Whether or not this improved my performance will be revealed in due time.

What was I talking about again?

Oh yeah, the test was pretty easy, actually. The people that failed before probably didn’t try all the tute questions. Either that, or they couldn’t finish in time, which is viable since the integrals you need to do can take up to at least a page.

Whatever the outcome, I just hope that I get a credit at least.

I hate university exams.

The idiocy of one

I just realised how stupid my last post was.

Rather than assess my study habits and deduce a proper timetable, I decided to single out the course that gave me the most trouble and bag it out as well as its lecturer. As if that will help me.

What I need to do is single out the areas of each course that are baffling me and make an effort to understand those concepts. Hopefully without wasting any time (it is only the end of week 1, after all), I’ll have to trawl through my notes once more. Better early than never.

I read somewhere once that you should actually strive to understand material within 48 hours of receiving it, so I’ll veer towards that in the future.

It annoys me to even have to write this, because it’s another of my classical efficiency posts. It’s like I haven’t learnt a thing from my previous transgressions.

I have more disgusting habits to fix.

All in due time…

I need to maintain my entropy.

A week into second year university, I’ve got to say I’m swamped. It worries me to even think this because not only did some of my labs and tutorials not start, but an entire course that I have to do hasn’t even begun yet.

The other day, I texted a blunt response to a friend who asked me how I’m going. My reply went as follows,

I wish I had time. It’s only my second day and I already feel pressured to keep up.

Are you for real? If I had written a text like this in high school, I’d tell myself to suck it up and erase it. I really need to get to the bottom of this problem, and I have a decent idea of the main source – thermodynamics.

This course has been giving me hell from day one, because all of the concepts seem to subliminally coalesce and I can’t keep my focus on certain scenarios. Moreover, the study requires the recycling of many symbols to do different things, like if you wanted to find the heat of a chemical reaction, you’d need to know whether to use Cp or Cv, depending on whether pressure or volume is constant. What’s worse is that when you delve into the study of enthalpy, the partial derivatives of the energies of your process are taken with respect to temperature at constant volume and pressure and then equated, meaning that you also need to know the temperature change as well as volume and pressure conditions. That is supposed to be an easy application of enthalpy, by the way.

Right.

I don’t know exactly what to do about this, but something I’ve been trying is just make up a whole bunch of visualisations and hope that they stay in my mind. They don’t help memorise the equations, but they might help in remembering what restrictions I have on processes. My lecturer is a down to earth man that spews out seemingly important information by the bucketloads, so I feel like I can’t fit everything in my mind or take the time to write something in class without missing some other important content. It’s like I’m in some sort of destructive loop.

Incidentally, it’s all reminding me of an episode of FullMetal Alchemist, where Hoki tries to take over Youswell and Edward explains Lyra’s alchemic reactions:

She liquefied the air around her, reduced its volume then vaporized it producing a shock wave, the light came from the heat generated by the forced compression needed to maintain entropy.

I never understood it then, and still don’t, but I soon will.