CCC2: Learning the ropes

My classes have finally all begun. I've had my other three start these past two weeks: Chinese 2, Advanced Research, and C programming, which I will refer to as "CS 36".

Chinese has been a breeze. I grew up speaking Chinese so none of the content is anything new to me, just review. Each week, we have two discussion assignments, where we have to record ourselves answering certain prompts in Chinese. This is the main reason why it's difficult for me to bang out all the Chinese homework in one sitting, because I hate having to slow down and record a video. I also hate having to reply to other people's videos with empty, meaningless forced responses. But aside from that, I can't see myself not getting an A in this class.

I don't even know what's going on in Advanced Research. For a 3 unit class, the work doesn't seem to be any more than 1 hour a week. Each week, we have to do two workshops which I assume are somewhat related to research, but most of the workshops are the obvious things in the world if you have any common sense. Additionally, each workshop has a "pre-check" quiz and a final quiz, where you must earn at least an 8/10 to "complete" the workshop. The issue is, the questions on the pre-check quiz and the final quiz are pretty much the same, at least they have been so far. So essentially, I've skipped through all the videos for every workshop, amounting to a total of maybe five minutes spent on each workshop.

CS 36 is just overall a pretty big waste of my time. We have two four and a half hour lectures a week that never have any substance to them. Last class, I took my laptop to the piano and just started practicing while simultaneously listening to the lecture. Throughout the entire four hours, I think we only got through "printf," and "scanf." The solutions to our "labs," were like five lines of code. I wouldn't say this is a bad class, but the lectures are just seriously a waste of my time. If I could change one thing, it would be to take this course asynchronously, so I don't have to deal with its ridiculously slow-paced lectures. Oh, and we also got assigned 100 pages of reading, so that's fun.

Counseling 6 is still the same as its always been. I got kind of bored, so I have these little minigames and side quests for myself, like trying to get a specific person to reply to me on the discussion board. I still haven't succeeded. The assignments also aren't too terrible, and some of the prompts are genuinely interesting.

Now for the big one - multivariable calculus. Since my last post, I had my first test, and I didn't do as well as I would've liked - I scored a 51/60, 85%. It's not the end of the world, but it's definitely scary now that my grade is pretty borderline. I could make excuses, like I had a really bad stomachache that was bothering me for the entire exam, and I had to leave the room for like 15 minutes, but there's no point. I'll just do better next time.

Since then, I've actually kind of begun to hit my stride, I'm processing the content fairly well, and have been doing well on quizzes. I'm not trying to jinx anything, but tomorrow I have my second test and I actually feel pretty good about it. On our most recent quiz, I scored a 10/10 when the average was a 7.3/10, so that was a nice confidence boost. The big thing with this class is that I really need to keep my quiz category as high as it is, because my grade is hanging onto it for dear life.

These past couple of weeks, a really big issue has been sleeping. I certainly haven't been getting enough of it, and a large part of it is due to staying up later than I should on weekends, as well as binge sleeping on weekends causing my schedule to be extremely messed up on weekdays. I remember one day in multivariable, I was so tired that when I went back to look at my notes, I didn't remember writing any of it down, or doing any of the problems. Plus, half of it was illegible. However, I did get a little bit lucky because that is the only chapter that we aren't being tested on.

Besides this, I think I'm finally starting to get an idea of what my schedule and workload looks like, and it seems fairly manageable. I've learned which courses I need to put effort into and which ones I don't. I've learned which courses are stupid, and which courses I see value in. As long as I can keep doing what I'm doing now, I think I'll be fine.

Twitter: My Twitter account is my place to jot down random notes and thoughts during the day, so I think it makes sense to include some of my thoughts and feelings throughout the past two weeks.

I've found myself so lost in my work, or whatever else I'm doing, that I forget to eat meals. Some days I eat dinner at 10 or 11 pm, other days I stay at the library and procrastinate eating lunch so long that I just never do. I definitely need to get better at eating my meals regularly, because this is certainly not healthy.

After that 85%, I began to have doubts again, and I needed something to lift my spirits. I needed to prove myself again. And with that 100% on a quiz with a 73% average, I did just that.

When I finish all my weekly assignments, maybe around Sunday afternoon, I know that another wave of them are soon to come in. It's quite unsettling always feeling like I have things to do, even if they're due dates are still a while away. It's really hard to not focus on them, and it's a bit stressful knowing that pretty much every day this summer, there are deadlines looming ahead. I'll never have that sense of completeness until summer's over.

This isn't as negative as it sounds. This is in direct reference to tomorrow's exam. One of the biggest motivators for me recently is seeing how well I can do compared to the average. I don't really care about being better than other people, nor do I think getting a higher score makes me smarter, or somehow a more important person, than anyone else. I just think that I've worked really hard recently, and it's nice when the results reflect that.

This is a reference to Bring Me the Horizon's "Can You Feel My Heart," particularly because those lyrics have been pretty relatable at this point in time. Sometimes, I wish I could suppress my emotions as they are very distracting and make it difficult to focus. More often than not, they lead to spirals of sadness, which are sometimes the reason for my inability to sleep.

As a self motivator, I'm also going to begin to include my grades on every post. If they fall, the whole world gets to witness my crash and burn. So hopefully, that is enough for me to keep them up.