Where Things Stand
Monday, November 24, 2008 - 11:03 PM - Blogness
Posted by Ghost
I am so very tired right now, didn't sleep at all last night or today and have to stay awake the tiniest bit longer so I am writing this as something to occupy my brain for hopefully about twenty minutes. Then I will be sleeping about 12 hours and waking up at 7am, hopefully fixing my screwed up sleep schedule finally. Last night I decided on it, and went to computer-science this morning instead of going back to sleep and continuing my horrible sleep patterns and procrastination. After that, studied some calculus and did the midterm as two-thirty. Really wasn't horrible but I could have done better if I had gone over asymptotes more.
Anyways, this post is about everything that is going on with university right now (my life currently). Basically, it started out as me in Software Engineering because I knew I had to go to university if I ever wanted to do real programming jobs, and because I was never really too interested my searching stopped when I found software engineering at the University of Victoria, as far as I was aware (which wasn't very) the program would allow me to learn to program and be able to get me a job working on videogames (or other things, because I just like programming)
So I went through everything I needed to get into Uvic, dealt with alot of registration troubles because I was being bounced between two people for my registration who apparently were not aware that another person was also dealing with my registration. I finally got in when I sent a very long email explaining all the crap that they had put me through in trying to register and that is when they realized what had happened, and admitted me for the next year.
That's pretty much the basics of how I got into university, and the software engineering program. Since then I've managed to fail horribly in many aspects of everything I am doing lately.
There is probably no good excuse for any of this, but I've got some reasons at least. When I started this semester, I really didn't know what to expect. The program requirements had me in six classes, so I had a pretty full schedule. I found out quickly though I could not read the boards in most of the classrooms, often even from the front of the class (I had no idea my eyes were that bad for reading) so I ended up skipping a few calculus classes out of my schedule to go downtown and get glasses because I couldn't read the board anyways and the class was so huge that I could never read the board like that anyways because the front would fill up so quickly (not that I can read that well from the front without glasses anyways) It ended being three weeks into the semester by the time I got glases because they apparently tried to phone to tell me they were ready but no one answered.. I didn't have any missed calls over the entire period and the only reason I got the glasses is because I showed up in person and asked if they had them yet.
So by that point I was already behind in my classes. Another thing that helped with all this failure would be the way assignments seem to be done. They are worth about 1% each and you pretty much have to work on them throughout the week because when you get the assignments, most of it won't even have been covered in class. And having 6 classes, all giving assignments either weekly or bi-weekly like this just seemed to be causing everyone to struggle for hours with the assignments that were worth such a small amount of their grade. It just seems like it would make more sense for them to suggest problems from the textbooks that we should be capable of doing after each lecture rather than have us struggle with work we can't do yet.
Anyways, I can actually go to sleep now so I'll try to get through whatever else I think should be included here.
I've had some pretty screwed up sleep schedules, obviously. But because of them I started missing more and more classes and just wasn't able to wake up when I needed to no matter how hard I tried. I hated so much about how the classes were run that I was losing interest in unversity all-together even though I know I need it. Eventually (sort of recently) I though very hard about what I wanted to do one night and the next day, went to talk to my computer-science professor, and I ended up talking to three other people that day for a few hours as I tried to figure out what to do.
It turns out that a computer science degree would pretty much get me the same jobs as far as programming goes, so why be an engineer? I never applied for the degree program in hopes of being an engineer, it was always about the programming. It's what I enjoy. So I decided I would switch. It's one less class, and for the most part just computer science and math classes, no more physics (or the horribly long labs that go with it), no mech, no chemistry, no engineering classes. I would be much happier with just math and computer-science, they are things I enjoy doing for the most part. (math only when it works, computer-science even sometimes when it doesn't)
So I did what was required to switch into Computer Science for next semester, but now I've found out I will need to pass Calculus and CSC 111, and get a GPA of 2.0 to get in. Now.. to get a GPA of 2.0, which should generally not be a problem is abit of a problem for me. Because of all the trouble I have had, pretty much failing three of my classes (I had talked to them about switching degrees about a week after the deadline for dropping classes I think) is not going to help keep my GPA up. I honestly don't know if I can even do well enough to get a D in any of those classes. If my GPA is below 1, I get kicked out of university. If I get below 2 I will be on academic probation, but still able to do the classes requried for the computer science degree, so I will just have to do well in them and apply for it again next semester. The only way my GPA is going to be below one, is if I get abit less than a C average in both CSC and Calculus I think, which isn't going to happen. But even if I was to get A's in both that is only 1.6 so the most likely thing to happen right now is I will be put on academic probation next semester, but I will be doing classes I will enjoy and with a less stressful schedule. So it could be alot worse. 
Going to sleep now. That's my life currently. (Or what I am willing to write about at least)
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