i was conversing with the saviour of my statistics project and it went something like that..
saviour: “iron is actually very nice. blah blah blah blah“
me, thinking: “iron is very nice? has he gone mad?!”
saviour: “he just gave us the answers to the statistics project during class!”
OH.
he meant my lecturer, ian.
i’ve just completed my statistics assignment.
i seldom feel so strongly upon the completion of a deadline, because most of the time, i don’t put in my 100%. i don’t believe in killing myself over school. i wouldn’t say i’ve put in 100% effort this time, but it’s been some time since i’ve invested so many brain cells on a deadline.
this deadline was completed with some divine intervention, i believe. i met the right people at the right time twice this week and i almost lost my thumbdrive with the only copy of the assignment in it.
my solutions may be far from the perfect one. in fact, i’m not sure whether i used the correct analytical models in the first place. oh well, i’ve tried.
there’s still another statistics assignment to go (lecturer’s gonna spring a last minute assignment release on us again) but hey man, i’m done with this!
i can do anything!
it’s time to bury myself in statistics. gotta submit an individual statistics project next friday. there is an urgent need to figure out the central limit theorem, among the ten million other things i cannot comprehend. the only thing i remember about central limit theorem is the president’s glee when she figured it out in those good old days. i should have taken the effort to straighten the damned thing out before i graduated. the thing i hate about statistics is that i have no idea how things are relevant. what the hell is the point about standard deviation and variance anyway?
fortunately the statistics lecturer is painfully slow in his progress. half a semester has gone by and he’s still doing lecture 3. which means we wouldn’t cover more than six lectures this semester. this is very good news for me, because six lectures instead of twelve means the grounds to cover for the final exam is halved. considering i take days to try and understand just one lecture, six lectures are enough to kill.
i guess the sydney weekend will be a good reward for completing the project and figuring out the first three lectures. the brother’s graduating! which means the parents are visiting and the ultimate point is good food galore. these are the main reasons why i have to visit sydney. sure enough, i have to lug my readings and work to sydney so that i survive the next few weeks. but i’ll be feasting on kickass seafood and dim sum and all other forms of yummy food. the parents will also be visiting canberra for a day or two, which will be very bad for me. bringing touristy parents around boring canberra during deadline season isn’t my idea of fun.
goodbye, world. till we meet again.
oh dear, sonific songspot is down. no more looped song on my blog. damn it, i miss that song already.
i will be submitting the worst essay that i have ever (hopefully, will ever) submit. i must have been blinded by the dazzling pink tags on my diary when i agreed to work on the essay with someone i barely knew.
i’m just keeping my fingers crossed the essay still gets a distinction.
i have a strange fetish for writing assignments and working on projects. that is, if they are individual assignments. in fact, i adore working on assignments and projects and i would rather submit them every lesson if only i could be excused from classes. for some strange reason, i detest attending classes, unless they’re kickass classes involving a subject i’m absolutely interested in.
just like how i was really tempted to skip today’s afternoon class because seriously, i don’t learn much from this class. the only reason why i’m taking this module is because it’s a core module. i turned up eventually since i was expecting to collect an assignment which we submitted before the term break. turned out that the assignment would only be returned to us next week. no complaints, but i was kinda cranky throughout the class, especially since it’s winter and the sun sets early. it depresses me to end classes when the sky is dark. my good mood only kicked in when we reached the last page of the lecture handouts and by the time i packed up, i was humming to myself.
i also have the strange habit of forgetting to wake up after the alarm goes off. sure enough, i use the snooze button like there’s no tomorrow. the problem is, my phone has a weird snooze function. upon pressing the snooze button, it shuts up and goes off again in another 9 minutes. don’t ask me why it’s 9 minutes, it puzzles me as well. the worst thing is, the snooze function disables itself without any major warning an hour after the original timing. so for the past few mornings, i’ve been waking up late.
waking up too late for classes is not a good way to start the second half of the semester.
when i was considering whether or not to do this masters course, one of my main considerations was whether i should put myself through the horrors of the statistics course again. ridiculous as this may sound, i was on the verge of not doing this course because the statistics module is a core course. there was no way i could avoid it if i were to enrol in the course. i remembered the painful semester when i was an undergrad trying to comprehend statistics. to date, i believe i passed because of moderation and pure luck. logically, there was no way i could have passed the course with my kind of grades and even the stats assignments and projects i submitted were crap.
fast forward to now: half the semester has passed and damn it, i’ve been skipping too many stats classes. i swear i turned up for classes the first few weeks but no matter how hard i tried i was just LOST. i’ve also tried catching up with the lectures while refreshing the basic knowledge i should have learnt from undergrad days but it just doesn’t work.
right now i’m getting more and more confused by all the stats lingo and analytical models and what not. even with a very good textbook that explains everything in quite a clear-cut manner i can’t figure out tonnes of things. there’s still the stats project which i’ll be doing alone and some other assignment which the lecturer hasn’t released details of yet.
keeping my fingers crossed i pass the stats course and graduate as planned. i might become suicidal if this stats course keeps me in school for another semester, touch wood.
the term break is finally here! i have a love-hate relationship with term breaks, especially this last term break that i will be enjoying as a student. only half a semester left before the good life ends.
the term break is an ingenious idea. people like my dad wonder why can’t school just carry on so that it’ll end earlier. just like how he thinks we should have more classes every week instead of a three day week so that it’ll shorten the semester. of course he doesn’t know that the current workload and timetable is enough to kill if i were to conscientiously do my work. by the time half the semester passes i’m usually so tired i need a break or literally die.
but term break isn’t all fun and play. i’ve been so keyed up with deadlines i couldn’t sit back and relax yesterday, i just couldn’t. i performed much better today, slept most of the day away, did some leisure reading and watched plenty of dramas online. guess i have to allow myself some breathing space before i plunge into deep waters again.
this time next week i’ll be bumming away in melbourne. hanging out, sightseeing, drinking, having fun. for the sake of that i think i should work slightly harder this week, eh?
i feel strangely accomplished because i woke up before the housemate left for work. i actually woke up at 8am this morning, without any alarms pissing me off!
there can only be two reasons why i’m behaving abnormally:
1) i’ve been waking up at 4am and 5am for the past two days to complete my assignments. those were desperate measures cos after i woke up i had like, six hours to finish my papers or i’d be dead. so i guess in comparison 8am is kind of late.
2) i went to sleep at 10pm last night. it was good to sleep when feeling all relaxed and happy. for the past week or so i’ve been going to sleep with globalization and logistics and self-serving bias and decision-making and corporate governance and problems of the Japanese firms during the economic crisis in my mind. so after submitting the last assignments for this week yesterday, i couldn’t convince myself to do the readings for today’s classes. not for all the chocolates and junk food in the world would i ever do that.
and a good sleep puts me in a good mood. 
i can now save the world.
squeezing words out of my brain, word by word, in order to meet the word limit for assignments is no joke. especially so when the topics are not my favourite ones, corporate governance and the impact of self-serving bias on decision-making.
my brain hurts from trying to churn out more arguments.
there are times i feel like stabbing myself cos i am so hopelessly confused most of the time. i thought i have improved slightly over the past two years since i’ve seemingly screwed up on fewer occasions. that is, until i broke the records again.
a month ago i started straightening out my deadlines and made a mental note to start on my pre-term-break assignments early cos there were a lot of readings for them. somewhere along the way i got mixed up by the course codes and my memory turned fuzzy. then, two weeks ago, the logistics lecturer started telling us about what he expected from our logistics essay. so for the past two weeks i thought the essay on logistics was to be submitted this thursday.
being the confused person i am i couldn’t remember whether the logistics paper was to be submitted on wednesday or thursday so i decided to check the course outline again. this happened around noon on tuesday.
freaking hell, the logistics paper is actually due in may! so i panicked and checked everything again. turned out that i had mixed up the logistics paper with the corporate governance paper. needless to say, i hadn’t started on the corporate governance paper at all.
two papers in 24 hours. i don’t know whether to applaud myself for my efficiency, to hope for the best grades i can get out of this or to just end my tragic life before it gets worse.
