I earned a B+ for the first course, only three points shy of an A. It was a respectable grade but I felt I should have done better. The final for the second course was this past Friday. I at last found my studying and learning groove during the past couple of weeks, and to continue the sports metaphors, I knocked that final out of the park. It replaced my less than stellar midterm grade, and I ended up with 210 points out of 200 for the course as a whole (not a typo; the instructor set up a strange system) and a solid A for the second course.
Now I'm in the home stretch. Today was the first day of the three-week lab course. It's a very odd schedule: six hours of lecture on Mondays and Thursdays (TWELVE HOURS of lecture a week; it's not a course, it's an IronMan trial) and four-hour labs on Tuesday, Wednesday, and Friday. There is the most amazing flurry of paper associated with this course, far more than the previous two lecture-only courses. We have pre-labs and two "lab reports" for each lab, a formal written report for one lab (basically a technical writing assignment), homework problems, and of course the labs themselves. And there will still be a midterm and a final!
Even though I've started meeting more people, I ended up getting three lab partners sort of by random--we were standing next to each other when the instructor told us to form groups of four. We perform three of the labs as a group and the rest are done individually, but the lab group forms a sort of study group for the various things we have to turn in. My lab partners are three geeky young men. Even after the first lab, I felt that we worked well as a group. Nobody was too precious to go get a clamp or clean some glassware, and we all took turns doing the more exciting bits of our lab today. It was a pleasure working with them, to be honest. No drama; they all had a reasonable grasp of the experiment, the equipment, the chemistry; they all communicated appropriately; and we worked efficiently enough to finish up well before the official end time of noon.
Despite the heavy workload for the next three weeks, I can see the end in sight and I know exactly what I have to do to excel in this course.
1 comment:
Yep, your first grade teacher was right...no one else will ever push you as hard as you push yourself. Good luck on this next round of classes. I have every confidence that you'll be amazing.
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