It seems that I just arrived in Australia and started my uni life not too long ago, and now I am so near to my first final exam at university level. Time flies off so fast that it actually scares me. Perhaps the hectic student life burdened with tests and assignments are making us oblivious to what happened around us and the time that has passed. Judging from this I can say that my 4 years of uni life (hopefully i can get into Honours) would pass really fast, and without realising it we have officially turned adult and start our working life.
Sigh... It is really hard to truly balance between work and play as we don't actually know where the appropriate boundaries are. How much time should we devote to fun and excitement, and to serious academic pursuit??This is a hard question, no doubt. But for me the priority is still studies as I know how hard it is to graduate with an actuarial degree and am pretty sure that all the hard work will pay off at the end, during the graduation ceremony and more so in my later career.
I am studying with a lot of China Chinese and guess what? They are extremely and amazingly diligent (crazy and obsessed) with studies. You can see them studying at every minute, in any place they are encountered. Even during lunch time they will be hugging their books, I am not joking here. That explains their good grades. Some attribute this to the competitive nature of academic life back in China, and I totally agree with this. It is the hardest to study with Chinese. Sigh...
Okies, I guess the post is getting pretty boring when all I am thinking now is how to squash all the stuff that i learned in this semester into my head and make it stay until my last paper is collected. Lets end here and I promise to make up for all the uninteresting posts with some really enhilarating ones after my exams.
Monday 28 May 2007
Sunday 20 May 2007
My Sunday
I went for a job interview today at Chatswood. Had a fairly tough time locating that building which lies at an obscured corner around Railway Street. After nearly half-an-hour looking here and there like a TOURIST i finally found it to be just a 5 minute walking distance from the Bus Interchange. Haih....blame myself not bringing a compass, haha.
It is a large dental surgery which apparently needs more dental assistants. The youngest Dentist over there, Dr. Gordon opened the door for me and held the interview with the presence of another part-time job seeker from China. He spoke alot about what kind of tasks we are expected to do...and bla bla bla there goes on to things like the pay rate and the trainings we need to go through to gain acceptance into the job offered. Hm....he said we need to perform well and impress the dentists over there, only then we'll get the job. It's gonna be tough...I guess, but anyway I shall just try my luck after exam. Meanwhile I can look for some other part-time job as back-up in case I don't get this one. The good thing about being a dental assistant compared to other jobs like waitress, cleaners etc is that I'll get to learn new stuff (about the equipments, general knowledge about teeth) and also hone up my communication skills. But I really need to be careful with all the sharp objects used in the surgery.
The ugly side of this week is the stupid Perdisco assignment I have to do every week. The question asked for expected returns on investment but surprisingly the answer given turns out to be the accumulated value of investment money!!!DAMN, this means my answers are all marked wrong and I was given a super sucky mark instead of 100% that i decerve (coz I did everything right!). DAMN, this is why i hate the use of MACHINES as a tool of assessment. A machine (computer) does not give any consideration to ambiguity of questions and will never think he is wrong. Super hate it! But anyway the final exam is so near that i don't have time to dwell too much on this. What matters in the end is the final exam which will be marked by HUMAN instead of COMPUTER. If I score well in that I will DEFINITELY be rewarded regardless of what happened in the Semester. So really need to work hard on it.
Pretty much the same stuff as my last entry?? Sorry, these are the stuffs that shape my life over here and I don't have too much other things to write on other than uni work and life. Winter break will come after exam and by then my blogs will be a whole lot more interesting than this one. Promise.
Oh yea, my ex-housemate Audrey actually read my blog and I feel so happy to hear from her. And....Joy and Martha bought me a good-luck present for my job interview and I felt so so touched. What's more, Martha just refused to take back the shirt she lent to me and insisted that I keep that. I don't feel good to reject it and promise to buy her something as soon as I get my first pay. There are lots of wonderful people around me as are nasty and weird nerds. Not all elements of uni life are making-you-feel-good, but they certainly would make me grow.
It is a large dental surgery which apparently needs more dental assistants. The youngest Dentist over there, Dr. Gordon opened the door for me and held the interview with the presence of another part-time job seeker from China. He spoke alot about what kind of tasks we are expected to do...and bla bla bla there goes on to things like the pay rate and the trainings we need to go through to gain acceptance into the job offered. Hm....he said we need to perform well and impress the dentists over there, only then we'll get the job. It's gonna be tough...I guess, but anyway I shall just try my luck after exam. Meanwhile I can look for some other part-time job as back-up in case I don't get this one. The good thing about being a dental assistant compared to other jobs like waitress, cleaners etc is that I'll get to learn new stuff (about the equipments, general knowledge about teeth) and also hone up my communication skills. But I really need to be careful with all the sharp objects used in the surgery.
The ugly side of this week is the stupid Perdisco assignment I have to do every week. The question asked for expected returns on investment but surprisingly the answer given turns out to be the accumulated value of investment money!!!DAMN, this means my answers are all marked wrong and I was given a super sucky mark instead of 100% that i decerve (coz I did everything right!). DAMN, this is why i hate the use of MACHINES as a tool of assessment. A machine (computer) does not give any consideration to ambiguity of questions and will never think he is wrong. Super hate it! But anyway the final exam is so near that i don't have time to dwell too much on this. What matters in the end is the final exam which will be marked by HUMAN instead of COMPUTER. If I score well in that I will DEFINITELY be rewarded regardless of what happened in the Semester. So really need to work hard on it.
Pretty much the same stuff as my last entry?? Sorry, these are the stuffs that shape my life over here and I don't have too much other things to write on other than uni work and life. Winter break will come after exam and by then my blogs will be a whole lot more interesting than this one. Promise.
Oh yea, my ex-housemate Audrey actually read my blog and I feel so happy to hear from her. And....Joy and Martha bought me a good-luck present for my job interview and I felt so so touched. What's more, Martha just refused to take back the shirt she lent to me and insisted that I keep that. I don't feel good to reject it and promise to buy her something as soon as I get my first pay. There are lots of wonderful people around me as are nasty and weird nerds. Not all elements of uni life are making-you-feel-good, but they certainly would make me grow.
Friday 11 May 2007
Winter's coming, so is exam
The weather this few days is sooo COLD. I would shiver in outdoors if I happen to forget my sweater. Woo....and when the wind flows you would be freezed to death without proper warm clothing. I heard from my friends that Melbourne is even COLDER. I wonder how we are gonna visit around Melbourne after finals.....by the way we have booked the ticket to Melbourne this winter. Crazy, you might think, for all reasons we prefer not to stay in the relatively warmer Sydney. But anyway we are just gonna stay there for six days so I guess it would be okay.
Compounding the 'misery' of life here is the never-ending coursework we as actuarial students have to complete. Just finished two tests this week (i guess I did fine), but we really have no time to rest on our laurels because two assignments are expected from us and ECON test is coming next week!
The lectures are getting tougher, as expected. But in a way it motivates me to work just that bit harder to cope, which is a good thing (as far as I'm concerned). Tute works are pilling like hills right now, and I don't quite understand how some people can still take up more than one job in semester as a full-time student. No doubt, this would compromise studies!! I would much rather study hard and try to score better in exam than trying to earn more money (which I don't think I have the time to spend anyway given our current workload).
Oh yea, I finally cooked myself a pot of curry and it was gorgeous!! Can't believe that a pot of curry of such good quality came from the hands of an amateur cook like myself. Maybe I was just lucky to have mixed and cooked everything in the right proportion. One thing is for sure, my cooking, no matter how amateurish it is, is a million times better than what I can get by paying outside. This is especially true for the sucky sandwiches I bought (because I needed more time to prepare for exam rather than cooking). ARGH, the supposedly chicken sandwich was so tasteless that it tasted like plain FLOUR with RAW vege. And how much you guess it costed me? 2 slices of bread for $4.25!! Almost RM13!! But that's the way we live when we don't have time to prepare food.... Not only our taste buds suffer from the sucky food, our wallet will suffer too.
That's all I can think of this week.
-Xin Yin-
Compounding the 'misery' of life here is the never-ending coursework we as actuarial students have to complete. Just finished two tests this week (i guess I did fine), but we really have no time to rest on our laurels because two assignments are expected from us and ECON test is coming next week!
The lectures are getting tougher, as expected. But in a way it motivates me to work just that bit harder to cope, which is a good thing (as far as I'm concerned). Tute works are pilling like hills right now, and I don't quite understand how some people can still take up more than one job in semester as a full-time student. No doubt, this would compromise studies!! I would much rather study hard and try to score better in exam than trying to earn more money (which I don't think I have the time to spend anyway given our current workload).
Oh yea, I finally cooked myself a pot of curry and it was gorgeous!! Can't believe that a pot of curry of such good quality came from the hands of an amateur cook like myself. Maybe I was just lucky to have mixed and cooked everything in the right proportion. One thing is for sure, my cooking, no matter how amateurish it is, is a million times better than what I can get by paying outside. This is especially true for the sucky sandwiches I bought (because I needed more time to prepare for exam rather than cooking). ARGH, the supposedly chicken sandwich was so tasteless that it tasted like plain FLOUR with RAW vege. And how much you guess it costed me? 2 slices of bread for $4.25!! Almost RM13!! But that's the way we live when we don't have time to prepare food.... Not only our taste buds suffer from the sucky food, our wallet will suffer too.
That's all I can think of this week.
-Xin Yin-
Friday 4 May 2007
A busy weekend
Two tests are coming next week with just TWO days apart!!! This sounded really depressing wasn't it? Well, there's nothing I could do except to study really hard. B0th ACST and STAT tests are worth lots of assessment marks and therefore it is truly crucial to do well in both. Phew...... Have alot to memerise and absorb this weekend.
Another thrilling fact is that we are close to the end of the Semester, which means that the finals has started to beckon. It feels like time just flies through thanks to our busy routine, but a more optimistic way of thinking is that we'll have a long one-month-break after the last paper of the semester. Meanwhile I'm pretty sure lots and lots of work are coming, and I have to really find time to do other stuff like exercising and doing my grocery shopping. And yeah, need to pick up my work permit after the tests next week, if not the document would get extremely bored of staying at the immigration office.
HM.....Can't think of anything else to write now. My mind is just too clogged with examination materials at the moment. I think some of my blog readers might be getting really sick of my partially depressing tone and the lack of exciting narrations these few weeks, coz the assignments and tests are really making people's life less interesting. Haih.... Promise to write about stuff other than exams when I finally get over all these hurdles.
That's all for this time.
P.S. Hey Terine, you haven't told me your blog address have you? I would really love to see some of your pictures taken in US.
Another thrilling fact is that we are close to the end of the Semester, which means that the finals has started to beckon. It feels like time just flies through thanks to our busy routine, but a more optimistic way of thinking is that we'll have a long one-month-break after the last paper of the semester. Meanwhile I'm pretty sure lots and lots of work are coming, and I have to really find time to do other stuff like exercising and doing my grocery shopping. And yeah, need to pick up my work permit after the tests next week, if not the document would get extremely bored of staying at the immigration office.
HM.....Can't think of anything else to write now. My mind is just too clogged with examination materials at the moment. I think some of my blog readers might be getting really sick of my partially depressing tone and the lack of exciting narrations these few weeks, coz the assignments and tests are really making people's life less interesting. Haih.... Promise to write about stuff other than exams when I finally get over all these hurdles.
That's all for this time.
P.S. Hey Terine, you haven't told me your blog address have you? I would really love to see some of your pictures taken in US.
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