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 :)