Tuesday, 23 July 2013

A retrospect and thoughts over the events of my previous semester in university.

I have noticed that while this blog started as a side project that I plan on doing while beginning my life in Monash University Sunway Campus, I have noticed that there is a severe lack of posts relating on my life in university.

Well, I thought that my life in university is usually pretty boring, to be honest, I am a Science student after all, and I spent most of my time studying or doing assignments if I'm not playing my 3DS. But I think a retrospective post of the events of my previous semester sounds like a great way to summarise everything that has happened in the past 4 months.

Anyways, I'll keep it really short and as simple as possible.

So to me, the whole semester was all about finding the balance between playing my 3DS and studying (since I got my 3DS about a month before the commencement of the semester). I've been playing my 3DS a lot since I got it and I was wondering how will I be able to balance out my studying and playing time when I start studying again.

Unfortunately, what I felt was an extremely rough start that only started to get better during the last few weeks of studying. Really. I think the fact that I was playing my 3DS a lot, combined with the 4 month summer break spent on not studying made me extremely rusty (or that's what I thought).

Towards the middle of the semester, I bought two new games - RE:Revelations, and MGS3D. The good news was those games weren't as addictive as Fire Emblem, so I didn't spent additional time playing the two games (by then, I had already cut my gaming time by a lot).

By the end of the studying week (and the weeks before exams), my thoughts on the subjects were:
Chemistry - Shit (Horrid lab report marks, and tutorial classes that sucked for me)
Psychology - Great (While it has super annoying assignments, I did pretty well overall)
Biology - Normal (Had some ups and downs, but it was pretty balanced)
Food Science - Between Normal and Shit (Assignment marks were just okay, and lab marks were below average in my opinion).

So, it pre-exams, I felt everything was just average for me. So I try my best to read up on as much as I can. And then it was exams. And after going through all the papers, my thoughts were:
Chemistry - Shit (No time to finish everything, some answers left blank)
Psychology - Between Normal and Shit (It was a tough multiple choice paper)
Biology - Between Normal and Shit (Also, a tough multiple choice paper)
Food Science - Between Normal and Good (Easier than I anticipated)

By the end of the exams, while I was glad everything was over, I was also a bit disappointed by my overall performance so far for the semester.  I mean, I kinda anticipated that my studies might be affected by me having a 3DS, but I didn't thought it would be this bad. Still, I had my hopes up that I would not fail anything for this semester.

And then last Monday came along. To my relief, I passed everything, having 3 Distinctions and 1 Credit. Not too bad at first, since I got 1 HD, 2 Ds and 1 C last semester, but when I look at the marks I got for the grades it was kinda bad for me.  The marks for the grades were 0-3 marks away from the borderline (as in 70 is the borderline for Distinction, and the marks for my Distinctions range between 70-73 if I remember correctly).

In short, the good news is that I didn't fail anything, and that my grades were better than I thought it was. The bad is that I'm not extremely satisfied with the marks I got from those grades.

Anyways, I hope that the last semester has taught me how to balance my gaming and studying time. As my holiday comes to an end next week, I have to plan how to make sure I get the most out of gaming and studying, hoping to get through to the next semester without any problems.

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