End of Fall 2010 Semester
Originally published at Highmoon's Ponderings. Please leave any comments there.
Geez, has it been a semester already? I feel like it was one of those paradoxes, where time flew yet stood still. But, with the posting of final grades today that means the Fall semester is officially over, and with it, my first year back in school. I’ll tackle that milestone in a separate blog post; this one is all about the semester that just ended. To start, let’s look at what my grades looked like when all was said and done:
- Introduction to Microbiology: B
- Introduction to Microbiology Lab: B
- Principles of Nutrition: A
- Introduction to Statistics: C
First of all, let me say WOOHOO, I PASSED STATS!!! That out of my system, this is how this semester went down.
Frankly, this was a lot tougher a semester than I thought it would be when I registered for it. Though it was only 3 classes and a lab, it somehow drained a lot of my time: between learning 8-9 chapters of information per Microbiology exam, doing the near-endless stream of inane projects for Nutrition, and slamming my head against any and every hard surface I came across due to Statistics, I was challenged constantly to change my ways when it comes to learning and studying. In many ways, I was still relying on the techniques I learned while I did my English degree-things like mnemonics, batch memorization, association of general concepts in order to deduce the respective details from those later on-and while this certainly worked in some classes (well, really, only in Nutrition), it proved only of partial help in Microbiology and of no help in Statistics. Which means I had to re-learn how to study as well as dust off that ancient mystic art of crammin’.
On a personal level as well, this was a challenging semester, which added pressure and stress to my already heavy load. Midterms week, for example, was just bad all over, resulting in my worst Midterm’s performance ever, and I mean ever, including the years oh-so-long-ago when I went to school to eat shit. Thankfully I was able to recover from it and ended up with grades that I am actually happy with.
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