Letters to my future self

20060327

Letters to my future self

27th march - the 7th week

its nearly 2 months already... i'm beginning to know more people here, mostly thru group assignments. also joined the singapore student association, joined them for a paintball session some 2 weeks ago. it was fun, but pretty tiring and well, abit expensive, despite a subsidy.

work i starting to pile up as assignments start to be due, jus submitted 1 last week and another one's due this week.

shopping this couple of weeks have been real unlucky too. sunny the moment i stepped out, 10 mins later it start pouring out of no where and its no even a drizzle, its a really heavy downpour. no shelther wad so ever either. *sigh* it lasted for abt 10 mins, which left me really really wet. not only did it happen once, it happened to me twice, last week and this week. bloody hell... pfft

doesnt look like the plan to work part time is working out, btw study, work and wow, i can only pick 2. looks like i might shelf the plan for work, for the moment.

internet connection has not seen any significant progress, still very erratic, goes down occasionally, slow most of the time. seem to have torrents blocked, as i can no longer seem to d/l anything using bittorrent. oh well.

got to catch dinner for now...
-out-

20060307

Letters to my future self

mar 7th - the 1st month

ok, today marks the 1st month that i'm here. 2nd week of school has also started, which means my tutorials have finally began.

all's well. but i'm struggling abit with the workload. i dont know how important the readings we're told to do are, but theres definately alot of them. every of them seems to be reseach journals that are 10 odd-20 pages too.

might change my mind and drop 1 subject to 4. my idea of taking 5 this sem and taking 3 next sem isnt quite working out, as it seems, its compulsary for us to take 40 pts worth of classes per sem, so even if i do take 5 this sem, i still have to take 4 next sem. not a very gd deal, and considering the current work load, i'll prob drop 1 subject for now and save it for the next sem.

the way classes here are conducted are also abit wierd. for the 1st time i'm hearing things like "dont worry about getting your homework wrong, we'll only be marking them for completeness, as long as you show reasonable attempt at the question, we'll award you the mark. so i encourage all of you to attempt the questions". jus wierd... i know the homework are only marked to give marks for tutorial participation (which most of the time is a give away mark), but this is jus plain wierd.

abit more on falling asleep during lectures, situation seems to have slightly improved. sweets keeps me awake for abt 30 mins, before the sweet melts entirely and i fall asleep approximately around the 40th min ><". out of my 4 lectures this week so far, i've managed to stay awake throughout one of them (the irony here is, the lecture that i stayed awake in, was actually the most boring lecture out of all of them)

and new thing i learnt this week: paying attention during lectures actually helps keep the mind awake! ;p

the worrying bit comes in abt 2-3 weeks time when my 1st assignments will be due. alot of them look really ugly. requires a certain amount of research and writing journal reviews, comparisms. god, i hate it already. got to do even more reading ups and stuff... ack.

*sigh*
oh well, to be for now
-out-

20060301

Letters to my future self

1st mar - the 1st week at school

ok, i'm almost here for 1 month already, school's finally started... however at the same time, problems are arising....

connection problems. it seems that the connection in my room is abit erratic. there was a period of 5 days last week whereby the connections was reduced to a crawl. i had to wait about 5-10 mins for my yahoo inbox to load properly. my net activites was reduced to jus chking emails and msn. there were 2 other accounts whereby the whole network was down, couldnt even connect. i might consider outsourcing for a new connection. having to pay 40aus per month for a 3gb cap on downloads and having to bear with this... i really shd reconsider.

enrolment. strangely enough, i'm running into problems for enrolment too. as it seems the program conveyners didnt plan the program for so many students. they claimed that "theres a sudden influx of students". well anyway alot of the classes are over enrolled, yet there are still students that dont have places in their desired course. they're still tryign to make arrangements to open up new classes but as of now, i'm only enrolled for 4/5 courses i would like to take this sem and in addition to that, because i was force to choose some of the really odd timings for my tutorials, i'm actually only studying from mondays-wednesdays every week, thats 5 subjects in 3 days. bah.

workload. its only week 1 and there already a hell lot to prepare for class next week, plenty of reading up to do and even homework for accounting. there arent even tutorials this week. costs of textbooks are also pretty insane, i'm having to fork out abt 100aus per text for at least 2 subjects. there shd be a 3rd one, but i probably can get a 2nd hand text at half the price.

nodding off during lectures. god, it seems that i've nv gotten rid of this problem at all. it was the same during poly, sigh. initially i thought i didnt sleep early enough, therefore i was tired and fell asleep. but i proved myself wrong earlier on when i nodded off during an evening lecture, when i'm supposed to be the most awake. i need this problem fixed soon, for now, i'll jus have to buy sweets to keep myself occupied.

oh boy... and this is jus the beginning.
time to hit the sheets
-out-