math – Imaginary Sunshine

Guess what?! :D (!!!)

Michelle — Fri, 07 May 2010 07:35:10 +0000

So I passed calculus, just wanted everyone to know… because I’m so fucking happy about it. *Ahem* Anyways… Maybe a photo would help me emphasize my happiness over passing calculus?

Yeah, that happy.

Ahem. Not that I won a gold medal or anything… But now I’ve got all my grades in, yay! And I can take the biometrics course that I am required to take next year now (because I’ve passed calculus), yay! (Yeah, I’m excited about getting to take biometrics, clearly there is something wrong with me.) Oh joy. *dances*

(I’ll be definitely writing about something a touch more interesting later.)

Bleh…

Michelle — Mon, 26 Apr 2010 02:22:08 +0000

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.

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:

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

And the anti-derivative of e^(1.05x) is…?

Michelle — Wed, 21 Apr 2010 22:33:30 +0000

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.)

Scheduling in my schedule

Michelle — Wed, 14 Apr 2010 02:24:55 +0000

So this is my schedule for the next… week and a bit. Classes end on Thursday, and once that’s over (I end at 9:30am!), I’m hoping to do ~9 hours of studying per day. The first few days will focus mainly on invertebrates zoology (first exam, upcoming Monday) and then after that it’ll be ~9-12 hours/day for 3 courses (working on problem sets, practice problems, practice exams, reviewing material I haven’t laid eyes on since January, etc.). Absolutely no sleeping in – I plan to continue to wake up at 5:30am every day and get to bed before midnight.

Finals are underlined and italicized, priorities for specific days are underlined.

For every day that I don’t follow my study schedule, I’m fining myself $1 for each uncompleted task to go to a non-profit organization of my choice.

I plan on studying at home for the rest of this week (mostly because when I have class, I hate spending more time on campus than required). Next week (starting Monday, April 19th), chances are that I will be spending the majority of my time on campus (either harassing getting help from my math and biochemistry profs, isolating myself in a library or perhaps seeking out like-minded students for study groups!).

Items that are struck-out are completed. Items highlighted in red were not done.

Wednesday, April 14
Studying – invertebrates, biochem
Working on – biochem assignment, problem sets

Thursday, April 15 – last day of classes
Studying – invertebrates, biochem
Working on – biochem assignment, problem sets

Friday, April 16
Volunteering
Studying – invertebrates, biochem
Biochemistry assignment #2 due – 11:59pm Completed 04/15
Biochem Problem Set #5 Completed 04/16

Saturday, April 17
Studying – invertebrates, biochem, math
Working on – biochem problem set #6, math problems

Sunday, April 18
Studying – invertebrates, biochem, math
Working on – biochem problem set #7, math problems

Monday, April 19
Final #1 – Invertebrates zoology – 12pm
Studying – biochem, math, vascular plants
Working on – biochem problem sets, math problems

Tuesday, April 20
Studying – biochem, math, vascular plants
Working on – biochem problem sets, math problems

Wednesday, April 21
Studying – biochem, math, vascular plants
Working on – biochem problem sets, math problems

Thursday, April 22
Studying – biochem, math, vascular plants
Working on – biochem problem sets, math problems

Friday, April 23
Studying – biochem, math, vascular plants
Working on – biochem problem sets, math problems
Biochem review session 3-5pm

Saturday, April 24
Final #2 – Calculus – 7pm
Studying – biochem, math, vascular plants
Working on – biochem problem sets, math problems

Sunday, April 25
Final #3 – Biochemistry – 12pm
Studying – biochem, vascular plants
Working on – biochem problem sets

Monday, April 26
Final #4 – Vascular plants – 7pm
Studying – vascular plants

Catch up, catsup

Michelle — Thu, 25 Mar 2010 04:20:05 +0000

Monday was a somewhat stressful day for me. Had a midterm, found out that my third math midterm (yes, apparently you can have three ‘middle’ of the term in one term!) that I was told by my prof was this Wednesday (a.k.a. today!) is actually next Wednesday. Giving me a whole other week to study for the midterm. So it was a huge relief and yet, at the same time, a source of annoyance as I had been stressing over the third (!) math midterm. =/ Stupid calculus, doesn’t even know there’s only ever one true ‘middle’ to anything.

Tuesday was actually really fun, I had my comparative invertebrates zoology lab and we looked at insects, crabs, lobsters, crayfish and other fun related creatures. They even had live things for us to look at, which was nice. I think I spent about half an hour holding onto a little crab (same species that I did my major final paper on back in 2007!) and letting it crawl from one hand to the next. It was fun, I love crabs (and moving rocks and disturbing them on beaches to scoop them up – that sounds awful, doesn’t it?) and other marine wildlife. Which pretty much means that this biology class is the best course ever. Except, perhaps, second to the course where I did do my final paper on a specific species of crab (and got to play for a few weeks with live specimen!) and human anatomy and physiology (because it was super fascinating). Fun day all around!

Wednesday (today, yay) was pretty low key in terms of actually interesting things occurring in school. I watched videos of spider mating dances (very funny stuff goes when a male’s trying to get things to happen!) and watching spiders mating (kind of boring). Math was actually pretty okay today, we got extra practice problems and a sample midterm to look over (with answers, thank goodness). My plants class was pretty okay, we didn’t do anything too exciting beyond talking about sex in plants. My plant professor did say this at the beginning of the unit though “Biologists are the only people who are constantly thinking about sex.” <- which is probably very true, given what biology is all about. No matter what organism you study, you always want to know how it reproduces and keeps itself going. Hence… sex (and also, for plant physiologists, pollination methods… and subsequently fertilization). You would not believe how long it takes for a pine ovule to get fertilized. Blew my mind.

The good thing about going to Michaels to refund something (ill-fitting dolly-sized glasses) is that I can refund it and get the monies credited back to my credit card. The bad thing about going to Michaels to refund something is that I end up browsing the clearance section again. I ended up with one package of handcrafted glass beads (going to be made into earrings and necklace set!) and two tubes of 11/0 round glass beads in ‘rainbow tiger eye’ and ‘metallic forest’ (a.k.a. very uniform seed beads with a very nice sheen, you can tell which ones are the ‘metallic forest’ because of the more green sheen to them). Oh, and a ball of Red Heart Super Saver in Cherry Red (for amigurumis!).

Also, I have some super important news that is deserving of its own entry, so I’ll be writing about That (deserving of capitalization!) later – probably tomorrow or this weekend.

Hope you’ve all been doing well lately and that you all have a wonderful Thursday!

I can has weekend soon?

Michelle — Fri, 05 Mar 2010 03:38:03 +0000

Tuesday, March 2nd
I wrote my invertebrate biology lab midterm. It’s worth ~14% of my final grade so while it’s not a whole lot, it’s still worth something. I feel, having had prepared for it, that it went fairly well. There were some questions where I definitely looked into the microscope, looked at the specimen and had no flipping clue what it was. However, each question is worth 1-2 marks each and that was only one station (there were 20 stations in total, plus 2 “rest” stations with biology-related comics). Nothing else of great importance occurred on Tuesday.

Wednesday, March 3rd
I had my second math midterm… I did prepare for this, and felt pretty okay with the questions that were on the test. My problem, however, is when my professor decided to start the midterm. The class doesn’t start until 9am. The previous class period is from 8:00am to 8:50am, giving people 10 minutes to get from points A to B. This is fine, I can get to the building where I have my math class in about 5 minutes. My issue is that I arrived at the lecture hall where I have my math class at 8:55am and everyone is already seated and writing their midterms. I had a serious “WTF” moment when I thought I either walked incredibly slow or the clock in the lecture hall I was in previously had stopped or was behind. Turns out that my prof had issued out the midterms at 8:50am and had allowed people to start writing then. Gah. I felt rushed with that midterm, mostly because everyone was already writing while I was entering into the room, finding the TA to get a midterm and then finding a seat somewhere in the room. Ugh.

I went thrift store shopping yesterday – picked up a non-Blythe doll with a near complete set of clothes (missing one shoe!) that turned out to be a doll that goes for $50+ (NRFB) on eBay. Go figure. But now she’s sitting on my shelf, completely naked as a jaybird as I’ve swiped her outfit (poor Hermione, all without her Gryffindor clothes) for my other dolls. I also picked up another awesome find (more about that later) and then went to visit K, who invited me over after my thrifting adventure for the day. Hadn’t seen her in a while, so it was great to catch up! Plus I got to show off my thrift store finds, which is always fun! She was studying/procrastinating/taking a break from studying when I arrived, so it was all good.

Thursday, March 4th – Today!
I had the biochemistry lecture from hell today. While I understand the concepts and such, it was just so damn boring! My prof kept on repeating herself for the people who didn’t get it the second time and because she kept on forgetting that she had already said some of the stuff that she was saying! Ugh.

In my plants biology lab, I got my lab midterm and my (first) lecture midterm back! I did surprisingly well on the lab midterm. See, it was the first of the three midterms that I had in just under a 24 hour period, so I did not have high hopes for those test scores (who would?) but turns out that I did much better than the class average (yay!). I was totally cringing at the thought of getting the lab midterm back that I was so regretting even going up to my TA to get it from her. Also, got my lecture midterm back as well… I did fairly good on it too! My prof drew a smiley face on the bottom of one of my pages because I doodled a flower (it was next to a question asking about roses, so I drew a rose after finishing my essay and waiting a moment before going over everything, again).

School has been keeping me pretty busy since it started up again on Monday (guessing two midterms on consecutive days will give me that feeling!). I’m still keeping up with my 365 photo project – I’m at 10/365 now! Hehe. I’ve been taking stock, pretty much, of things lately. Trying to get myself grounded, eating more healthy, exercising (hello running? My legs hate me again), watching a little bit less of television (but to be fair, I don’t really follow that many shows religiously anymore) and just trying my best to be happy overall. There’s been a lot of things going on lately that I cannot change, but I have realized that I can change my outlook on the things that occur in my life. It’s either that or be miserable and cry all the time.

I hope everyone has been having a marvelous week so far! Are you looking forward to the weekend? I am!

I am a sick, sick individual.

Michelle — Thu, 28 Jan 2010 00:18:21 +0000

One of the schools that I applied to for their nursing program sent me a letter with this quote which made me freak out a little:

This letter is a final notice that important communication(s) about your application, registration or grades is waiting for you at [URL], the website for [insert school name here].

Guess who didn’t set up email forwarding from this school’s email to an email that actually gets checked? I did that (now). There were 55 emails waiting in my school email (for that school) which had the exact same things as the letter than I got. Final notice! Turns out it was a ‘communications’ (non-email? What the fudge?) about how that they’ve gotten all my transcripts and additional documents (which were hand delivered) and that my application is now considered complete and is being considered for enrollment. <- That’s what I like to hear. You should have heard my dad. “Why are you getting mail from [school name]? I thought you’re going to [current school name]? You are only allowed to go to [current school name]!”. Then I reminded him that the other school also has a nursing program, so it’s really for ‘backup’ purposes.

Oh fudge, I’d hate to see his reaction when I get mail from the local college I also applied to.

In other news, I’m sick. Last night, I sat down at the kitchen table to take some cough medication and my sisters were both like “Why don’t you just stay home tomorrow?” My reply? “Got a math midterm tomorrow.”

And honestly, I should have just stayed home. I got a migraine near the end of my first class (right before math!) and the migraine made sitting in a very cramped lecture hall (holds ~200 people – all seats were taken) coupled with bright lights very uncomfortable. Half an hour into my midterm (the midterm was only for 50 minutes), I couldn’t focus on my paper anymore because of my head. I knew that the paper had a formula and I knew how to compute the equation, I honestly did. But I’m afraid I didn’t do too well on that midterm, mostly because I just could not focus. Pounding headaches suck, seriously they do. I’m currently sitting in my bed, with three blankets over my lap and around me and I’m going to have some soup after finishing this.

School rants and raves (but mostly raves!)

Michelle — Mon, 04 Jan 2010 23:03:43 +0000

First class – biology (invertebrates)

Professor is really energetic, very young (but not as cute as my friends had made him sound like he was – they gushed about his stunningly good looks). Course seems very straight forward, in terms of marking and labs. He was very enthusiastic with the introductory material, so I figure that’s pretty good – provided he can keep up the energy throughout the term.

1 lecture midterm, 1 lecture final, 1 lab midterm, 1 lab final

Second class – math

Professor was not the one that was originally listed for my section – the university switched profs on me! I forgot how big math classes were… I haven’t taken a university level math class since second term in 2008, so it’s been a while… It’s also a first year class, so I’m (for the most part) 2 years older than everyone else in the class. Which makes me one of the oldest students in the class. I also had to buy a new textbook ($148, boo) for the class. Class is canceled for Wednesday (already?) and I have two sections in a chapter to go through for Friday’s class. As well, my professor uses a chalkboard and white chalk. Gah. I need to get a seat closer to the middle and to the front so I can actually read what he’s writing.

3 midterms, 1 final

Third class – biology (plants)

Two professors! Awesome teaching team! I love the botany department at my school. I get my favourite lab coordinator from my first term plants class as a professor for the first half of this class, plus as a lab coordinator. Plus I actually know people in this class. Yay.

2 lecture midterms, 1 lecture final, 1 lab midterm, 1 lab final

Fourth class – biology (biochem)

Don’t know yet – happens tomorrow.

I switched lab sections for one of my biology classes so I have a lab on Tuesdays and Thursdays now, so I end at 12:30pm on both days, rather than ending at 9:30am on Tuesdays and 5pm on Thursdays (because I just love public transit during rush hour).

So far, I’ve got 6 lecture midterms, 3 lecture finals, 2 lab midterms and 2 lab finals for 3 classes

I’m also still missing my infant psychology final grade. From term 1.

9 to 10 Calculus

Michelle — Wed, 15 Jul 2009 03:06:28 +0000

I hit 2000 non-spam comments today! Thank you so much to everyone. Comment #2000 was from Cody. Many thanks to everyone who’ve commented over the last year and a bit.

In regards to my name, I answer to both ‘Muh-chelle/Ma-chelle” and “Me-chelle”. I mean, as long as I can recognize what someone is saying, I’m pretty good with answering to it. I generally do not answer to things such as “Hey you” or “You there”… Just out of principle.

Today was one of the more stressful days that I’ve undergone since… I can remember. I’m sure after I’m done writing this, I can come up with a whole bucketful of stressful situations that I have undergone (involving small flimsy-looking bridges, heights, turbulence in planes and waiting to see if I failed a course or not… Apparently I don’t need to wait until I’m done writing!). I had course registration today at 9am.

At 8:45am, I checked my draft course schedule and one of my labs (which is a nice 3 hour block of time!) was full. So I spent 10 minutes rearranging things so I could fit in the lab (somewhere) and still manage to get all my other classes. I put in two math courses into my draft schedule (two different ones) so when I hit ‘Register All’, I could attempt to get into at least one of the courses. There was a social science/commerce calculus class and an engineering calculus class. Guess which one I snagged the last seat in? Of course, the engineering calculus. Why? Because someone out there has a faster trigger finger than I’ve got. I hated people for approximately 2 and a half hours.

And then, on a whim, I checked courses again. And there were 3 spots available at an earlier math course – the one for social sciences too! I registered for that class first and then once I saw that I had registered into it, I dropped the (harder) engineering math class. So now for second term, I end at noon for Mondays and Fridays. I’m still trying to get a different time for a (mandatory) tutorial. So crossing fingers for that.

And, like I said, course registration is stressful. Especially when (stupid smarter) people keep on filling up the courses that you want!

But in other news… Today is Tuesday! Monday just seemed to drag on forever for me. One of my coworkers was moving office spaces (there’s a lot of rearranging going on at Buildings A and B at the moment) and she set me up with a small fan because her new space is a lot larger (with it’s own air conditioning) and thinks I’m going to die in the heat. So I now have a small fan that clips onto a small shelf and it’s aimed directly at me. It is a bit slow when it starts off spinning, so it takes a good 5 to 10 minutes for it to actually start spinning fast enough to generate any form of breeze in my general direction. But still, pretty spiffy. Especially since the weather’s been getting nicer lately too.

I need to buy some fray check… Eventually… Soonish… I was reading up on sewing tutorials (it’s been ages since I’ve sewn a thing, and they were specific to sewing dolly clothing) and it was suggested to use fray check (or some variation of it) rather than trying to surge or fold over and hem the seams since the article will be so small and it’ll just add unnecessary bulk. Which I can see happening. So… I need to find fray check. Eventually. If I want to ever do anything involving fabric, haha. But right now I’ve got another sweater on the needles. I’m trying out a different stitch pattern (following the same general amount of stitches and the decreases and increases for shaping, but different stitch pattern), not sure if I like it yet though, so not photos of my badly stitch work.

How was your Tuesday? To my fellow post secondary students… Good luck with course registration if you haven’t done it yet!