School/University/College

[Walker]

I'm going to uni next year, but I have no idea what I want to do so I'm scared I'll end up ruining my life by picking the wrong course

One wrong course wouldn't be so bad. As long as you get it early, you can always switch it out for another. And if you mean major/minor, you can always change those too~ No need to be right the first time.

[LadyNightshade]

Ha, I changed majors two years in.

It's put me behind, but I don't mind too much. I got a lot of gen. ed. classes out of the way doing art majoring for two years, and now I can get in just about any chem class I need to without worrying about all those extra credits.

 

It also is a benefit being an upperclassman in lowerclassman classes because I get to register before everyone else who is trying to get into those classes. Therefore I typically get into all the classes I need to.

 

 

I think statistically it's like 80% of people switch majors within the first year of college. So don't feel like if you pick something you have to stay with it forever.

 

You can also go into college and not declare a major to start with. You can just take some gen ed classes and think about what you would like a major in.

[Kestra15]

So, another change of life plan...I may go into Nursing. It's a three year course at uni, but it is free on the NHS which is nice, and much more likely to get into it than going into Paramedical Sciences. Which is a shame, but c'est la vie.

[Pink]

I plan on taking advantage of a lot more of resources, but sadly I am so sick right now (although I think I'm getting better slowly) that I can hardly think, much less actually talk to people.

>_<

[sheridan143]

Going to college just unsure where.

[Princess Artemis]

One wrong course wouldn't be so bad. As long as you get it early, you can always switch it out for another. And if you mean major/minor, you can always change those too~ No need to be right the first time.

It's also a good idea to wait to declare. No need to declare right away, since it's a practical guarantee it will change.

[Pink]

I'm not declaring a major just yet, either.

I have a pretty good idea of what I'm planning to do, but if the courses get too silly (There's no way I want to have to take "Basic computer") I'll change it out for something more relevant.

 

I'm not going to college to get a degree (although I may use the degree paths as a way to streamline my learning process) but I suppose declaring a major wouldn't hurt.

 

[Trikonasana]

I definitely should have waited to declare my major because I wound up changing it as soon as the semester change happened last year. I hated doing a science major, and it was only the fact that I had an English class as an option that I figured out I preferred that.

 

At least a semester of general studies would have probably been good for me.

[kiffren]

It's also a good idea to wait to declare.  No need to declare right away, since it's a practical guarantee it will change.

It's not a practical guarantee, it's just the majority.

There are students who come in knowing exactly what they want to do and plan to do. Most students, however, don't seem to have a clue.

 

Edit: I'm an incoming freshman. I'm a math major, and I plan to graduate in the minimum time required (two years). I'll graduate earlier if I can get the head of my college to sign the papers. (At my university there are three sub-colleges. My college has a minimum of two years required to graduate with a bachelors, however it is really flexible so I could probably graduate earlier than that.)

Edited August 31, 2011 by kiffren

[Princess Artemis]

That's what a practical guarantee is: something that will happen to most people. Now a guarantee, on the other hand, would happen to all people, which is why I didn't say it that way. If, what, 80% of people change their major at least once in the course of their studies, then declaring right up front, even if you happen to be of the 20% who won't, isn't prudent. At least, not as far as I know, since IIRC, changing majors costs money if one has declared.

[Stromboli]

Yikes this is gonna be a long semester.

Five classes, two ensembles and studio rehearsal on Wednesdays are just killin' me.

 

Anyone else going into music?

[RheaZen]

I met someone who was, but they said they'd probably switch into something more business-oriented since they were more interested in working for a record company or somesuch than actually playing or composing.

 

Currently: hating website assignments. Can't get the censorkippin' thing to work, arrrggggghhhh. y u due Friday.

[LadyNightshade]

Website assignments are the worst because I get too distracted. That and having limited internet access...

Or the thing is down half the time.

 

 

 

My lab TA said I looked very professional today in lab. Kind of funny because I had NO idea what I was doing.

 

It's the magic of the lab coat I swear.

[hazeh]

Ugh, web assignments. That's like, all I have right now Dx My math homework is done over MyMathLab, and while it's nifty, it gets to hurting my eyes/head after a while. And then I'm like, "Oh, Facebook!"

 

><;

 

Not very impressed with my teachers, either. My math teacher is very, um, slow, I guess. I don't really know how to describe it. She doesn't teach very well, because she gets distracted with one thing and then can't remember what she was doing or how to solve the equation. We have had to correct her several times on minuscule things that she should have known as a teacher. And it takes her like, five minutes to explain the concept of scientific notation, but only succeeds in making it more confusing if someone asks a simple question.

My art teacher also wasn't very thrilling, but hopefully tomorrow we'll actually get into some artsy stuff and he'll be a little more interesting.

I'm holding out hope for my Animal Behavior class on friday. English was okay, but she seems like a very uptight professor D: I want a cooool teacher....

[Obscure_Trash]

The only web assignments I've had were homework that was due in addition to written homework. Both assignments would be "normal assignment size", meaning they both took hours. Did not like. =|

Edited September 1, 2011 by SockPuppet Strangler

[LadyNightshade]

Most of my teachers absolutely hate our web system.

 

I think it's more that the university is really cheap and they don't want to buy paper for a teacher to print off 100 copies of it for people to just throw away.

 

Or at least that's the impression I get when any professor mentions they had to go to the web assignment system (they say it with dread).

 

 

 

Most of the time if there isn't a specific time limit (like, an hour to complete), I just print it off anyway to go work on it somewhere else.

[Trikonasana]

Some of the professors I've had have had really thick accents which make them difficult to understand... there's nothing worse than a calculus prof with a thick Russian accent, it's no wonder I just barely passed that class x___X

 

I haven't had web assignments at all since switching majors. In sciences we had them all the time, and in arts there are next to none. The most we use the web for is assignment outlines.

[RheaZen]

Ah, he sent out an email explaining the problems. Maybe I'll get it to work now. Provided I've got the right equation. h vs. h/2 vs. wat why do people use different things for the same equation.

 

I wouldn't mind web assignments so much if all the teachers used the same system. But nyups, I've got several websites bookmarked, not to mention the university pages for all the classes I'm taking.

 

@Triko You too, huh? Is it just me or do there seem to be a lot of math/calc professors with Russian accents?

/met two so far

[Trikonasana]

@Triko You too, huh? Is it just me or do there seem to be a lot of math/calc professors with Russian accents?

/met two so far

Yeah, I'm not sure what it is about math/calculus profs and accents but I don't think I've ever met someone who goes to university whose math prof didn't have some kind of foreign accent.

 

Engineering profs are apparently even worse.

[Elena]

I'm going to be starting community college in January. I could have started last week like everyone else who has just graduated high school, but honestly, I didn't want to. Plus I had no motivation to do so because I literally had no clue what I wanted to do with myself. I used to think I knew what I wanted to do, but I knew it wasn't right for me when my enthusiasm burnt out entirely.

This time, unlike the last time, I'm like 99% sure what I want to do now is what I'll want to do with myself. So after I've finished community college, I'll transfer to Central Washington University and major in Primate Behavior and Ecology. They are the only school in the US that offers a major in primate behavior, which is very cool :]

Edited September 1, 2011 by Elena

[Pink]

Oh gee. My math professor is Romanian. Thankfully I have a friend with an accent that's even thicker, so I'm used to it.

 

My other math professor is... well... I don't think he tries to be scary, but yeah... he's very intimidating.

I think he's hilarious (in a scary, strict way), but I think he has all other students hating him already. It doesn't help that he has a very fast paced, loooong class.

 

My language professor seems like a fun, if bit psychotic lady.

 

Ironically the professor I thought I would like the least, the philosophy professor, is the most normal, likable one.

 

 

[Walker]

My computer teacher has a thick Indian accent. However, he's my favorite professor even though I have to really listen to get him. He's not impossible to understand or anything if I pay attention~

[Trikonasana]

I always found that TAs for labs and stuff were terrible for the most part. The science grad students were the worst - when I switched majors I had an awesome TA who basically agreed that the material we were learning was dry as hell so she showed us youtube videos in tutorial sessions to make things more exciting.

 

But yeah, my physics TAs were especially awful. The one guy was really nice (even though my idiot lab group kept flirting with him) but the other talked extremely slowly and explained every concept fifty times as if you were complete idiots even if you got the question right. -___-;

[Walker]

Lol, I'm certainly rocking it like a freshmen I guess. Sneaking out to the graveyard in the middle of the night, check. It was creepy.

[Kamak]

Blah, been sick with a sinus infection since Monday evening... been having to force myself to go to class and I've been getting terrible sleep until last night (plus the meds I was taking had caffeine so I couldn't sleep).

 

Anyways, having second thoughts about Evolution, mostly because during the second lecture the prof. first told us that we were not going to acknowledge religion (except when discussing history (like how some of the first biologists were monks making observations of nature))... then spent the rest of the lecture talking about how religion is poisoning our society, trying to undermine evolution, and how we're all being repeatedly victimized every time they try to suggest that God directly created us.

 

The best part was when he showed that a survey of a random 1000 individuals showed that 30% believe in creationism, 15% believed in evolution, and 50% believed in some mix of the two (meaning anywhere from "Adam and Eve were monkeys" to "God created evolution"). He took this to mean that 80% of people were religious and denied evolution because "You can't believe in God AND Evolution" (He also dismissed the figures about where scientists fall on the scheme of things because "true scientists don't believe in fables"). And finally, the biggest wallbanger (and what really makes all of these "figures" the best part of the lecture) he put up a figure showing that there are more self-confessed religious people in jail than atheists, and that religion was the reason for this correlation. First, there's plenty of reasons people are in jail, most of which have little to do with religion. Secondly, atheists are smaller in number than religious people (or so you believe according to the survey) so wouldn't it logically make sense that the majority group would have a substantially higher number of individuals in jail? If I have a bag with 9 red marbles and one blue marble, I'm not going to be shocked if I pull red marbles repeatedly from the bag.

 

He got better about it on Wednesday, but on Monday, about half of the people in that room were ready to crawl out of their skins. I'm not even mad at him personally for having those views (even if they conflict with mine a bit, he's entitled to his opinions just as I am to mine). I'm more offended that he would use his position as a professor to try to rally us against religion and stop them from "destroying science".

 

This is the science that I don't like. The science that acts like the exact antithesis to religious extremism. This is the science that poopoos "wacky ideas" (he stated on Wednesday, off the cuff, that String Theory is just as baseless as the Bible, but physicists are "drinking the Kool-aid" and sucking up funding to study it) because it doesn't fit in their closed up idea of how the universe works (like the people who shoot down any idea that something can travel faster than light-speed, regardless of the explanation).

 

Also, today I had to go to my Microbio lab at 2pm... in 110 degree heat... in cargo pants and boots (because of what we're working with) and walk 15 minutes to lab... then go grocery shopping... with a mild fever.

 

I was so glad to be home.

 

Just got Microbio tomorrow at 11, then I got to check on my cultures in the lab and I'll be home for a 3 day weekend...

 

-K-