So I had my math final last night (starting at 7pm, bleh). I felt like it went fairly alright (then again, what do I know?). I had my biochemistry final today (yes, I know it’s a Sunday, someone should inform my university about that little tidbit too). And fudge it was difficult. =( On one hand, that class is not a prerequisite for any classes that I want to take in my 3rd and 4th year. On the other hand, it was freaking biochemistry and a difficult course and I spent a lot of money on the course, not to mention time. I’d finished nearly all of the problem sets (except for the second half of #8 – which was 30 pages long, by the way) and the practice final and all the tutorial problems and I feel as if all of those questions that they had made available to us did not fairly represent the difficulty of the problems that they were going to put onto the final. I left the room just before the professors told us that no one could leave as there was only 10 minutes left. There were people openly crying outside of the location of my biochem final. Openly crying. I saw one of my classmates on the bus after as I was leaving campus and she thought that was grossly unfair (in terms of difficulty when compared to the difficulty of the practice problems that we had). If they’re going to prepare us for the final, they should give us questions that reflect the level of difficulty or knowledge that we’re required to have for the final. </rant>

Just one more final before I’m done for the term… I won’t be getting my final grades until after the exam period is over (last day of April), but all of my professors have until mid-May to officially submit their marks (which is a lot better than when my psych professor took nearly a month after the final to input his grades). Whoot.

One more final, then I’m done for a couple months! I start work on May 3rd, pretty much looking forward to my almost week long break and to working again.

My sister was volunteering today at this convention and got a free ticket for my other sister to go and my sister (the one who wasn’t volunteering) met Mantracker! She got her photo taken with him and his autograph (one for her and one for me!). And I jokingly told her to ask him why he was so awesomely cool and then she did. His answer was “I’m not sure how to answer that without sounding vain”. Ahh, funny. I’ll take a photo of the photo card he autographed for me later!

Questions:

1. If you’re in school, what are you doing your summer term/break?
2. What is one thing that made your day today?

Dear self,

I love you, most days. See, I started off with a compliment!

But for the love of my freaking sanity, could you please remember derivative and anti-derivative rules when it comes to trig functions and e? I know you hate e. You wish you could kill e and get rid of that letter from all of mathdom forever, but you can’t. It’s sad, but it’s true. e is here to stay and you need to be able to remember, in a test-taking situation (i.e. this Saturday!), how to derive and find the anti-derivative correctly.

Sincerely,
The girl who’s stressing over the stupid practice problems (that are always wrong because of stupid mistakes, fuck.)

So I had my final for my comparative invertebrates zoology class today (it’s a prerequisite for a lot of the classes that I want to go on and take for my upper-level courses – including animal behaviour, the insects class, marine invertebrates, etc.). And I am so fucking glad that I went over the study guidelines so much over the weekend and in such detail. Everything that was required for us to know on the study guidelines was on the test. Also, we had a bonus question that was what was the course number (i.e. kind of like for PSYC 100, the course number would be 100) of the 4th year biology course that he recommended (it’s not going to be available until Sept 2011 though, hopefully I’ll get to take it, it sounds awesome!) and that was worth a total of 8 marks on my final. My final is out of a total of 200 marks, so the bonus mark was essentially 4%. 4%!

Dear Professor L.,

I’m solemnly regretful of the negative things I may have allegedly said about you in my last blog entry. You’re kind of super awesome. Now just make sure that your TAs are super generous when marking (especially when they get to my test!).

Sincerely,
Michelle

I left the exam room (about 90 minutes from when the exam started – the first person left an hour into the exam, we’re allowed 2.5 hours to write the final) at the same time as another girl and she was visibly upset because she said she didn’t realize we’d have to draw so much (which was mentioned, a lot, on the study guidelines) and that she thought the exam was “completely unfair” for those who didn’t have enough to study for it (???). I didn’t share the same sentiments, but I didn’t say that quite out loud.

Oh, note to self, don’t go into an exam without eating first! I ate breakfast at around 7:30-ish and didn’t eat lunch before my final (which was at noon…) and my tummy started rumbling at me and making its presence generally known just 20 minutes into the exam. Oh self, stop being such a distraction.

Hope you all had a wonderful Monday! I’m back to studying for my three remaining finals (math, biochemistry, vascular plants).