Friday, December 02, 2011 - 10:40 PM
Hi blog.
So what's been happening?
Not a lot of good stuff. Exams have ended but...
Let's start with the exams. Firstly, 311. I spent sooo much time studying for it. I did the problems in the lecture notes many times over. I made sure i understood every bit of it, that my understanding of the concept was solid. I felt prepared for the paper. I did pretty well for the midterm, so i guess i felt pretty prepared. Then about a week before the paper, i attempted the 'practice problems for final exam'. It totally threw me off. I did the paper at least 4 times over, yet i couldn't solve most of it without referiring to the answers. I consoled myself by thinking that he gave us really difficult questions so that the final would be a breeze for us.
I couldn't have been more wrong. The final paper was a total disaster. In the practice paper, the questions were set roughly like this: given 3-4 spectroscopic data, deduce the structure of a compound. That itself was pretty hard.
The final exam was like this: given 10 spectroscopic data, deduce the structure of 5 compounds. Which means we have only 2 spectroscopic data to work with for each compound. And some of the data was unreliable. (you don't know if the number in the MS data corresponded to the compound, or its fragment. Whereas in the practice paper, they would tell you. fucking annoying, and very evil).
So i pretty much have no confidence of passing that paper. i'm really upset because unlike those papers where you don't really study for it and you get a low grade, i invested so much time for this. If i had known the paper was going to be that insane, i would have put in more time and effort for 314 instead.
A few days before my last paper, i woke up at about 6am to an unpleasant smell. It wasn't stromg, but it was there. I knew that my cat had urinated in the house again. I looked for the source of the smell, thinking that it was under the dining table or near the fam (where she had previously peed). But it was right beside my mattress(I sleep in the living room nowadays, because my room is really stuffy). And guess what, my beloved blackberry was right in the middle of the puddle of piss. The damage was done. I have 4 months to go till i can change my phone, so now i'm using my old phone.
And i fell sick the day after the last paper. I was sick on my 21st birthday too. I was upset, really, but i felt grateful that i didn't fall sick during the exam period. I was seriously in no condition to study. So now, i'm typing this entry on the ipad. Pardon any typos cos i'm not used to it.
