Monday, November 14, 2011

Long Time, No See! HISASHIBURI~!

Hello everyone!

I apologize again for going so many months without any posts.  At that time, I became really busy and the blog started feeling like a burden.  I'm sure some of you know what I mean :)

I've decided to make sure I occasionally post on here, it's a good sort of release for me I guess, this sort of 'journal'.  It's also something I can reflect on later, and gets things off my chest.  Here are a few updates about my life, though I'm sure I'm going to neglect to post many things.  There's just too much to recall.

Go:  Barely playing lately, not studying at all.  I've gotten weaker, and my recent games show it.  Still, I'm hosting Go club every week and I'm still playing.  More than playing, I'm teaching!  I've been teaching at Golden Key Cultural Centre for a while now, and I teach people at Go club.  The GO club is doing GREAT right now!  We've been averaging 18 people!  A large group of passionate beginners have flocked in, and they're already good friends of mine!

School:  So I started school, my first year of university.  Frosh week was fun, really tiring and sleepless but I made some good friends.  This was the only important part for me.  I took The Literary Tradition, Intro Psych, Intro Sociology, Pre-modern East Asian History, and Japanese.  I dropped the English course because my course load had way too much reading and I'd fallen behind in some of my courses.  Yeah...  Although I've had tons of social fun so far, I've fallen behind. I've learned from SO MANY mistakes this term and I will never make them again.  I guess it was worth it!  I kind of bombed my Psych midterm, 53...  Yeah, I was shocked.  A smart friend of mine got even less!  He dropped the course after that :)  In Sociology I got only 73.  I had basically no time to study for my midterms, never mind...  Anyway, I think Sociology is easy and I will definitely get a high mark on the next midterm.  Japanese is around 80, I skipped a lot of quizzes and stuff for other things, but I will raise it to at least 85!  Premodern E.A. History wa chotto... (is a little...)
I once again had almost no time to study for the midterm, so I only got a 70 :(  I probably won't get higher than 73 or 75 in the end, but whatever..  This is my Fail Term, haha.  There are some issues with that course, but at least it's not something I'm going to get 65 or less in, so it's all good~  It's because at this point I don't see it as possible to fully catch up in all my courses before the Fall term ends, I've been trying all this time lol.

Right now I should be reading for Psych - I have 300 pages to read + studying, and midterm is in under 3 days!  But it's okay...  I wanted to relax for a few minutes and make this post.  Hisabisa dakara ne~
At least I've already read a chunk of the pages.  I will get back to it soon and continue for at least 6 or 7 hours (only 6 or 7, I have Japanese tomorrow at 9am and I need to stop skipping!)

After bombing my Psych midterm, I started calculating things to make myself feel better.  I may be wrong in thinking that GPA calculation is this simple, but here's how I am looking at this stuff right now:

Psych is a half credit, making it one 40th of my total courses in undergrad.  Then there's the fact that the midterm was worth just 30%, so roughly speaking, the mark acts as less than one 120th of my final undergrad GPA, ne?  And considering I scored roughly half on it, I only *lost* something like one 250th of my possible marks affecting GPA.  I still have a chance to get into the 70's or something in Psych this term.

The English credit I already have, ENG185Y (Intro to Literature) finished with a 77 (and taught me so much about writing and literature!!!  Thanks Prof. Maher!!)

So If we look at my CURRENT state, which is going to be terrible compared to my final term marks due to my big crashes from being behind (such as my 53!!!!!!), it's not actually THAT horrible, take a look:

eng185 - 77
psy100 - 57 (+4 for freebie marks from experiments)
soc100 - 75 (+2 for free marks from end-of-year questionaire)
eas103(history) - 75-ish (free 5% from weekly reading response assignments)
eas120 (jpn) - 80

By my logic, we should create duplicates of the year-long courses (since the smallest units are half-year courses like Psych) and then divide by total number.  So...

(77 + 77 + 57 + 75 + 75 + 75 + 80 + 80)/8
=596/8= 74.5 = What...3.1 or something?  It's not good, but better than I would have thought. Anyway, something like 3.0 at least!

Then I got to coming up with some goals...  I came up with 3 levels of goals for the end of this term (bad results without any extreme bombing, expectable results, and good-but-reasonable goal).  Without looking up the exact numbers I wrote down, they were something like this:

Bad result, end of 2011:

eng185 - 77 (this is obviously set in stone, since I finished it in the Summer)
psy100 - 68 (Fairly LOW goal considering I have like 70% of marks left up for grabs right now)
soc100 - 79 (No problem.  And yeah, this number is awfully specific ;p)
eas103 - 69 (Though I think getting less than 70's here would be weird...  hard to bomb or ace I think)
jpn - 81 (To me, this is fail considering my prior ability in Japanese)

This would put me sitting at 613/8=~76.6 = ~3.3, not so bad~ I guess.

Middle would be like 77, 70, 81, 71 and 83, respectively.  This would give me 77.8/~3.4 or 3.5

Actual/Ideal goals at this point, but maintaining some reason:

77, 73, 86, 74, 87
This gives me ~80.8/~3.7, almost 3.8!!

Then there are my Winter courses...

After learning from all the mistakes so far and getting the hang of university quite a bit compared to before, I plan to aim for much higher marks starting in 2012!! >:)  Not unreasonable ones, because I know how much I like to relax and go out with friends though :)

Soc and Japanese will continue into Winter (come to think of it, I probably can't get Japanese up to 87 by the end of the Fall term haha, skipped too many quizzes and messed up my Matome Mondai's too much.), so I will increase their marks a lot!  Psych and EAS103 will be replaced by AST201 (Astronomy, "Stars and Galaxies" and EAS105 (Modern East Asian History.  Oh Joy.).

I will be a lot more studies and NEVER fall behind again.  I will stay ahead!!  My aims for Winter:

Soc: 88?
Japanese: 87?
Astro: 86?
EAS103: 82?

Even if we assume results like 84, 84, 84, and 79 instead for these for some reason, then factor in the "middle/OK" goal idea listed above for Fall term (So, getting mediocre grades for both terms, but still pulling my socks up in the Winter) I'd get:

84+84+84+84+84+79 + 70+71+77+77 (each of these is 0.5 credit, = total of 5 credits by the end of first year) = (400+350+20+24)/10, =794/10=79.4, about 3.6 GPA.  That's OK!!

If the trend from second year continues at least as good as yr1 Winter, the GPA will be at least 3.9 or so later!  Even if I continuously slip up, I doubt I will fail to at least keep 3.6 or higher!!

Ganbarimasu!!

And now I'm thinking I should get to reading, so let me just sign out saying this...



Fate Zero~~  <3

3 comments:

  1. Look here for percentage-gpa conversion.

    http://www.artsandscience.utoronto.ca/ofr/calendar/rules.htm

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  2. Glad to hear everything's going well! Especially the Go club! I've also been suffering from blog-neglect... Good luck with the courses next year :D

    -Nik

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  3. Thanks guys!!

    Merry Xmas!

    I will be way more disciplined about things in the Winter!!

    ReplyDelete