Emergency Banana Productions

Well, there we are. I, the Most Ninetyeightious Azarov98, have finished my exams for my first year at Melbourne uni. Now I have to select my subjects for next year (and look sharp about it too, because re-enrolment’s due on the 20/11/09 and I still haven’t looked up many options, lazy bastard), and then me and God of the Pie can focus entirely on bringing Jeff’s Pie Shop back from the domains of the somewhat dead.

Here is how it all, approximately, went:

1. Chemistry 2, Tuesday 10th November This was probably my best exam, because I had several days beforehand to revise our materials. Our topics were Organic Chemistry, Quantum Mechanics, Reaction Rates and Transition Metal Chemistry. I actually managed to get to the end of the paper, and I don’t think I stuffed up badly anywhere. I generally regard Chemistry as good fun, especially organics (as can be clearly seen in the latest cartoon). Mind you, the practicals can be a bit of a drag…
2. Genetics and Evolution of Life, Wednesday 11th November Now that I’ve scared off all the faint-hearted creationists, we can continue. In this subject we got told all about exciting stuff such as genetics, protists, plants, animals and the evolution of mankind. (Now I’ve scared off all the remaining creationists, as well as a couple of pedantic lovers of politically correct language.) The exam itself was all right, all though I did have to make a few stabs in the dark and I don’t think my essay answers were all that great… Luckily, there wasn’t too much on hominids. But the protists really got me down.
3. Physics 2: Advanced, Thursday 12th November Dammit, what sort of stupid nincompoops stick three exams in a row? No time to relax a bit or anything. Anyways, in Physics, that most hard and boring of all subjects (which is the reason I did it), we were taught all sorts of fancy stuff about floating things, squishing and heating up gases and what it leads to, electric and magnetic fields, and quantum mechanics. (To all you layman brains out there - yes, quantum mechanics involves a lot more than a possibly dead moggy locked up in a box.) The exam itself I didn’t do too greatly at, spending way too much time on complicated questions in the middle and so missing out on completing the end question. Most shamefully, I couldn’t figure out the first two questions on fluids, both of which I had done before in the semester! The only entire question I did properly was the one on Ampère’s law, which is to do with magnetics. Ah, well, at least I’m sure I passed…
4. Linear Algebra, today, Tuesday 17th November This one has to do with matrices, vectors, vector spaces, eigenvalues, MATLAB and me being among the Front Seat Bandits at the lectures. As for the exam - seriously, there was so much to write: row reductions, inner product proofs, Gram-Schmidt orthogonalisation, and, when you get sick of it all, lots and lots of swearwords (joke). My hand got really sore. Once again, I reckon I spent way too much time on the stuff in the middle that I couldn’t do, so I didn’t have time to get to the end. But I guess that’s all right, since I had no clue how to do the last question anyway… about 70%, I reckon.

Looking on the bright side - at least they didn’t stick all four exams in a row, like last semester…

BTW, God of Pie has also finished his exams (the HSC ones, i.e. what high school kids do in New South Wales before they go on a drunken rampage). A while ago. He should really do a post about it too…

Tags: azaronomics, azarov98, Rants, Science

This entry was posted on Tuesday, November 17th, 2009 at 6:18 pm and is filed under blog. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.