Hoorayendofexams

Megs:

Here are some of the best feelings in the whole entire world:

1. Going for a pee after holding it in the whole night because it's too cold to leave the bed. (In the toilet in the morning, that is.) - Kudos to my friend Chris, who told me with much conviction this has to be the best feeling there is.
2. That scarily happy high feeling after you finish your last exam and knowing you are on a break and you don't have any uni to bother you for the next month and a bit and you are so happy you could scream!!!

I'm sure there are several other best feelings but whatever; I'm kind of on #2, although I'm quite sleepy at the moment, so I'm not really all that high. I have never studied around the clock for two weeks solid in the time leading up to exams! Stupid crazy things happen to you when they shove all of them together - Thursday am, pm then Friday am. My last exam was Stats, so I guess you could call this the aftermath! Ahar har har.

There isn't much to discuss about mine, except that Physics sucked for everyone, Medsci didn't, and Stats was a cinch. Pretty much sums up S1 2010. No paper I did this semester will really be relevant in my career. (Cheers to my mother for pointing that out). Someone from my class told us that his mate, who is an older Optom student, failed Physics, and passed Mechanisms of Disease with an A, and begged the Optom department to let him into 2nd year, so they were like "meh okay". Hooray! There is hope for all of us yet. And I understands statsy jargon now, which I suppose is of quite some benefit. Yee!

Nothing else is new that I haven't told you. If there is anything that is a bit different in my life that is worthy of putting on this blog is that I am put off pork and feel sick after eating it. The taste and smell makes my stomach turn. One more step towards vegetarianism becoming a rabbit.

Well now that I'm sitting here I might as well think about my to-do list for these holidays.

- Get Restricted driver's license (so slack; I probably won't get this done til Christmas)
- Finish watching Tess of the d'Urbervilles
- Finish 31 paintings of Kuan Ying
- Design dress/costume for the Eye Ball (another Ahar har har). Since the theme for the Optometry ball for 2010 is Horror, so I'll have to come up with something freaky and crazy. Lady Gaga will probably be good inspiration :D

Hum. I'm incredibly sleepy. You spiked the pizza at lunch didn't you? :P Hope you're having fun at work.

PS. Isn't it incredible that I am counting down the days til July 2nd, not because that it'll be my birthday, but because my TXT2000 will renew then? How things have changed. Ahaha. I need to get Txt4k.

Back in Auckland once again!

Wil:

Well... and so i'm back in the wonderful land of Auck. Woo! I'm very happy to be so.

I am sooooo ridiculously tired. Our flight was delayed 1.5 hours because they'd lost a screw somewhere behind some panel and had to call in the engineers to come find it -_-
In the end they couldn't find it and just told everyone we're going to fly anyway. Ha!

So yeah, semester 1 has come to an end. I'm quite relieved! I didn't think I could work harder than I did last year in Health Sci but I certainly proved myself wrong! Whether or not my results will reflect that will be another story. Let's discuss each exam:

1. PHCY256 (Biopharmaceutical chemistry): I think those fortnightly 'End of Module Tests' (EMOTs) actually were good things after all. I certainly didn't have to study nearly as hard as the other papers for 256 as I had studied the subject to quite a reasonable depth by the time study leave came about. Woo! I guess that's one of the main objectives of the EOMTs.
The questions were quite predictable and I was able to answer all questions with a relatively high level of confidence (except one question about Thin Layer Chromatography *yikes* I never liked TLCs...)

2. PHCY231 (Biochemistry): Despite having only had 17 lectures in the entire semester for this paper I felt there was an awful lot to learn (or more like memorise!). But what do you expect of biochem? Anabolic pathways, catabolic pathways, drug detoxification, inhibition of regulatory enzymes, activation of regulatory enzymes, influences of hormones etc etc Just a whole lot of memorising! For only a 7 point paper I felt that I spent too much time studying.
Being such a small paper overall it wasn't hard to predict (almost bordering on being psychic) what was going to be in the exam - there wasn't a lot to choose from! As long as you had all the pathways memorised then you were fine - and I was! I'm hoping for a good mark in 231 too!

3. PHCY254 (Physical Pharmacy A): Okay this is where it starts to go down hill (just a tiny bit mind you). The format for this years exam changed a little bit from previous years and the questions were a lot less predictable. Fortunately, I enjoy physical pharmacy as a subject in its own right and enjoyed studying for it. I'm just a bit bummed that it might not have been my best exam! I'm glad this exam didn't ask questions on very specific points that I hadn't fully studied.

4. PHCY251 (Physiology for Health Sciences): 32 multiple choice questions and 10 mini essays. Studied squat for it and still managed to successfully wing through most of the questions. Huzzah!
It's suffice to say that if I get anything higher than a B+ then i'll be quite happy!
But I do have to say that some of those mini essay questions were horribly written. Also, some sub-questions (of the bigger overall essay question) were allocated a big mark (>5) but you could only write very little on it (i.e. just a bit more than a sentence or small paragraph). So depending on the question it was either very easy to get marks, or very easy to lose them.


Ah well I can't wait to get my results back.

It's sort of time to relax now that holidays have arrived but I still need to do my community placement! As you know, that's sorta playing on my nerves a bit. Getting a bit anxious...

Oh! and we also have a group assignment to do for our NZ Health System module! Which reminds me - I need to email out information to my group partners!

Ugh it's late. Normally I would be in bed by now. I really hope my suprachiasmatic nuclei forgoes my temporarily adopted need to wake up at 6:30am every morning and let me sleep in for once! I don't think it has received the message that exams are over...


Blah

I love cheese. Nom.


I'll ttyl. Come visit me once you're done with exams.

And so ends Semester 1, 2010

Megs:

Well, like, what the heck? It's June already. This is officially my last month of being a teen! And I haven't achieved a whole list of things! But it's okay, I can do it in the holidays.

Here's something sciencey, I guess. Rabbits do not change sex. This is something that Marianne seems to be wholeheartedly convinced about. Rabbits are mammals! Mammals do not change sex, unless they're like the Man Who Gave Birth, except the Man Who Gave Birth was a woman to begin with. And this is something I saw on 20/20 sometime last year, and I'd noticed that he and his wife seemed very hurt by the fact that some people said it was no miracle that he gave birth to a baby. But since he used to be a woman, it was still biologically possible, so I would not have called it a miracle, regardless of how much he claims that it's a miracle because he's a male. It's like having a toaster and altering it so that it has a television screen and marvelling at the fact that it can still make toast. Anyway, rabbits do not change sex, Marianne, so there.

Animals that do change sex are salmon, and some other fish.

Here are some Semester One achievements. I've bought an Optom T-shirt, which is the wrong sex and like a size too big, but it's purple. I've written and finished 25 poems. I've attended for the first time a poetry reading evening and found out that I freaking love listening to them (but I guess it does depend on the writer/performer). I've sat 4 tests, have gotten marks I'm generally pleased with and have also gotten my lowest test score EVER, in physics, which I thought I didn't suck at at the beginning of the year, but apparently do, which is a new type of thrilling. I may have brought the class average down! Woopee. I feel as though I ought to frame the test paper on my wall :D
I have watched the first two episodes of Tess of the d'Urbervilles, and the first half of Great Expectations (the 1946 adaptation). Hmmm, have noticed a real pattern of not finishing the things I begin to watch. Kind of reflective of a lot of projects I do. Sigh.

Woo, wall of text. Huzzay!
Tomorrow begins the mad scramble to learn physics from scratch in two weeks.

Wish me luck.
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