Hello
After two weeks back to uni, I have successfully re-immersed myself in the dynamic flow of school life. I missed it. With the subject selection this year, I enjoy my ultimate year even more. The prospect of graduating in nine months time is indeed exciting but also leaves an enormous question mark on my diary – that is: what comes next? Having surveyed my cohorts who more or less gave me identical responses, I think I’ll wait for my GPA and then make up my mind.
So how has everyone been?
This year, I’m taking up all the health sciences: Anatomy, Biochemistry and Physiology major. So far, it’s been fanastic. The two 8 o’clock lectures are no longer a problem for me – for some reason, I’m ok with waking up early and all this year. It’s true that the workload has decided to trace along the exponential curve. It’s not a welcoming change but it was expected:
– a prac report of approx. 1000 words
– a research project of 3000 – 3500 words
Both are due in early April. What’s even better is that I have to read journals and use them as references for my report and project. It’s comforting to know that I have to inspect at least five journals for each… ok, maybe not that comforting…
Perhaps I should resume essay writing. If you haven’t read my last novel, you can find it here. I can still write coherently (to some extent…) but the lack of training for over two years has reduced my capacity to form nicer-than-I-can-do-now expressions.
If you’ve read the story, feel free to post feedback here. I’m planning to write another one soon, just for practice. =)
Have a nice day.
Till next time.
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Picture: image courtesy of ICanHasCheezburger.com.
… you only have two essays for the year and you’re complaining? 😛
two essays… for now… more are coming.
besides, they aren’t the typical essays. I have to search for journals and use them as references in my write-ups. Each of them is like 10 pages… some are really hard to read too, some are hard to find because generally, major publishers reserve journals for subscribers if the contents are more than a few months old… I’m trying to find a way to get my hand on them. Supersearch didn’t seem to help much.
… but that’s what essays normally are! What else would you do in an essay? Bah. Science students. In my faculty the first assignment in first year is reading 30 pages of a case, then going off to find 10-20 journal articles (or books, but usually the case is too recent for books to have been published yet) to make a 2000-word critical analysis of its issues. You get three weeks to do it. 10 pages is a pretty short article, the journal I edit does an average of about 25 pages except for commentaries and case notes which are around 5-8.
Although I do agree about supersearch sucking. I find the most helpful thing is to use ‘Find e-journal’ from the same window, and then type the specific name of the journal. Searching from the native interface of the databases listed in supersearch is better than using the general supersearch box. If all else fails, physical copies in the library are usually up-to-date, although if the journal publishes more than monthly they’re sometimes a few issues behind.
but… but… they aren’t essays per se.
they’re scientific reports and there are strict guidelines to adhere to. I only wrote formal report last year and it was really hard to meet the criteria. Even professional researchers, who have done this multiple times, had to redo their submissions sometimes…