Comments on my First Year

I just got back from the beach and feel like relaxing, so I thought it might be a good time to sit back and sum up my first year at UQ. I remember in the very first week thinking how easy it all was, hardly anything we learnt was different to high school. Then the second week hit me like a tonne of bricks. We started learning all these new things and everything was covered so quickly! I felt like I was falling behind in everything, but when I talked to other people I could see that we were all in the same boat. I got to the first exam period and studied solidly through swotvac and exam block, freaking out the whole time, convinced I was going to fail everything. Of course, I didn't fail everything, it actually went really well, so all that stress was for nothing in the end. You'd think I would have learnt from that, but no. This semester's exam block was even worse because I stressed just as much about the course work and I'd just lost my grandma suddenly. So it hit pretty hard, but in the end you just have to do what you can. Don't have results back yet, so I'll see how it went soon. I hope next semester I can actually put the whole "you can only do your best, stressing doesn't help" theory into practice. But yeah, I shouldn't just focus on the exams and the stress because there's so much more to uni life. Being a November baby, I still haven't had the whole uni ball/party experience, but I was in a hockey team and the dance society. I've been volunteering with EWB since mid-year break too and that's been a real highlight. There's so much great stuff to get involved in. Also, I've found that everyone's really friendly in engineering, you spend so much time at uni that you pretty much have to make friends with the people around you. I was amazed when I took an arts course as an elective and half the kids sat on their own, even though most of them had already taken courses together in first semester. It's not like that at all in engineering, you can always bond over a good "let's complain about how hard we work" session. So yeah, overall everything's been great. I'm pretty excited about next year when we start getting into our chosen fields a bit more rather than just studying pure maths, basic science, etc. Even more excited about 3 months holidays :)

Holiday Internship

Hey, I'm one week into holidays! Have just started a part-time internship with Engineers Without Borders, working in the education office at UQ three days a week. If anyone hasn't heard of them, they send volunteer engineers overseas to do community development work. The education office runs a bunch of programs including the EWB Challenge, a design/sustainability project for first year engineers, so over the last few days I've been sorting out resources for 2010's project on Murra Murra, a remote aboriginal community where the people have been given back a piece of their traditional land. Now they're looking at renewable energy and hoping to create an 'eco-village' that runs off solar power and EWB has stepped in to help. So in 2010, a whole heap of first year engineering students from Australia and NZ will be working on projects based in Murra Murra. It's also a bit of a competition, so the best designs are chosen and the teams present at the EWB conference in November. The overall winner gets to go to Murra Murra or wherever their project was based (ours was in Kandal Province, Cambodia). A friend of mine is going down to Melbourne with his team soon to present his project, so who knows, he could be in Cambodia soon! So yeah, it's a great project and we're all working really hard to make sure the next few years run smoothly.
Apart from the internship I've just been hanging around, ice skating, picnicing and partying (only a bit though since I'm still underage). Also planning a really big 18th birthday party :). Anyway, better go, have to start work.

HOLIDAYS!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

Well, one exam down, 3 to go. recon i got through math1051 without 2 much trouble, now time 2 cram for math1052. 1 wk til holidays...