Sigh of Relief?

Dress for success as I always say. Well, dress in a baggy shirt and an over sized hoodie at least. These past two days of exams have been...hell. I mean, not to put too fine a point on anything.

But it's all over now and that's the most important part. Yesterday afternoon was the English exam and I wouldn't say that I did fantastically but I don't think I failed either. Always a plus. And this morning something happened that was amazing. I looked at the first questions of the Psychology exam and I actually knew the stuff! I knew all 6 questions for developmental and all 3 questions for language and I could have gotten the full 5 points on each.  Too bad that I was only allowed to answer 4 from developmental and 2 from language. Also unfortunately, that's where my uber confidence stopped. I answered the rest of the questions, but I don't think that I got the full marks for the rest of them. But...and this is a BIG but...I think I might have gotten the grade I needed to get the 16 overall in the course. That'd be swell.

Anyway, the rest of today I've spent calming down a little. I'm a worrier so the relieve of stress after exams is actually more like spontaneously combustion. I might be the only person in the world who doesn't want exams to end. I just hate the feeling afterward. I've always been this way...ask my dad. After opening night of plays when I was younger I couldn't sleep and was prone to cry. Excitement he called it.

What's on the agenda for tomorrow? Cleaning my room. Pre-exam Erin's room looks a bit like a paper monster threw up everywhere.

Revision Week: Day 9

Well it's been a long, stressful 9 days of studying. That's not to say that I've only been studying for the past 9 days, but these 9 days were the "study only" days. Anyway, tomorrow is my first exam and I've worked it out. I've already passed the course. It's a barely pass, but if I were to not show up tomorrow I could still wouldn't have to take the makeup exam. It's a nice feeling really seeing as I know that I'm going to get more than a 0% on the exam. Less stressed? Yes.

Now...the problem is that my second exam is Thursday. I've also worked that out. I have to get at least a 17 on that to get the 16 overall in the course I need. It's my Psychology exam and that's the one that
I've been studying for mostly these past few days. I know I'll pass the exam...but pulling off a 17 is going to be hard. *sigh*

English exam is tomorrow
1 day until the Psychology exam

"There are different parts of the brain that deal with different parts of movement. There is logic to our movements and that's where the frontal lobe comes in. The frontal lobe plans/selects our movements. It co-ordinates our body and executes precise movements. The brain stem produces our basic or primitive movements such as eating, drinking, and sexual behaviour. The spinal cord is responsible for our reflex movements such at blinking and breathing. The cerebrum produces our voluntary movements. We cannot have voluntary control over our movements if our brain is disconnected from the spinal cord."

The Neuroscience bit of Psychology sometimes really goes over my head.

Revision Week: Day 8

2 days until the English exam
3 days until the Psychology exam

What I learned today: I'm done for. These exams will be the death of me. That is all. Good night.

And thus begins the exam freak out. Tune in tomorrow to see how everything goes.

Revision Week: Day 7

Well, my laptop decided that it had had enough studying for the revision week and decided to take a break yesterday morning. I was filling out some flashcard to help commit researchers' and psychologists' names (my true weakness) when all of a sudden the mouse pad stopped responding. I closed him all up and let him take a break for a little before opening him back up. The mouse still wasn't responding so I decided to try and shut it down. But the keys were also taking a short break. That left me with a manual shut down. I don't like doing those, but there was no way to turn Harry off. After the shut down and a five minute rest I turned Harry back on and he started doing a routine drive check. At this point, I was thinking, "Alright Harry, you do what you need to do."

Well he found a problem, something that has never happened. A little screen popped up asking if I would like the computer to automatically fix it. Of course I pressed the "yes" button. Too bad Harry couldn't figure out how to fix his problem. *sigh* So for the whole morning Harry kept saying that there was a problem and it couldn't be fixed, "press finish to shut down."

Now, I started freaking out a little. As a child of the technology age I don't really know how to function without my laptop. The first thought that popped into my head was, "How am I suppose to study!?!?!?" That's when I thought that perhaps I rely a little too much on technology and if my parents and their parents could study without the Internet at home then so could I.

I went to the library and checked out five very heavy books. Then I found a computer and printed off all the SAQs I had answered and written up so that I would have a guided study with my books. Retro right? Anyway, while online I took the opportunity to ask my friend if he could help Harry. He agreed and I spent the rest of the day worried about how I would study. I mean, who uses books anymore right? Haha!

Anyway, that evening I went over to his house and he fixed Harry in about an hour. I'm keeping the books though. It might be interesting to see what happens when I have to read a few chapter from each. Might even get a better mark on my exam because I didn't just listen to the lectures and review notes. I did extra stuff. *smile*

What I learned yesterday: You can study even when you don't have access to the Internet 24/7.

Revision Week: Day 6

Today was again a pretty relaxing morning. It was very lovely just to lounge in bed for a while before having to get up around half past nine. Then I wondered around town with a friend for a while. Which was also nice...but gotta admit, not as much as I liked sleeping in this morning.

But then it was back to work this afternoon for a few hours. Today I decided to try and study a little Shakespeare. Now, I love watching Shakespeare plays but reading them is a little hard for me. Not because I don't understand them but because it takes me forever. Why? I act them out in my head. And then I get bored of doing all the voices.  It's a tiresome activity.

4 days until the English exam
5 days until the Psychology exam

What I learned today. In Shakespeare's play "Richard III" Shakespeare depicts Richard as a real bastard. Apparently though...he was an ok King. But, he wasn't part of the Tudor family and since Shakespeare's main backer was the Tudors he had to make out the other monarchy families out as bad guys.

Revision Week: Day 5

Well, I had a very relaxing morning. It was quite nice. I woke up at half past eight (which is sleeping in for those of you who know me) then answered some emails, went for a jog, and had a late breakfast. I didn't do any studying really until I got to campus about 2 hours ago. Unfortunately, I've gotten into cognition. Now, I'm sure that cognition is interesting...actually, it is interesting. Too bad my lecturer for this part of the course was pretty boring. I mean, he was a nice enough guy but his voice puts me to sleep and his lectures aren't that well organized. So, it's like double work for me to try and get anything out of them. *sigh* Oh well, it happens right? Just means that I actually have to work to understand what he's saying.

5 days until the English exam
6 days until the Psychology exam

What I learned today. We have no idea how our mind works. Absolutely none. Anyone who says differently is crazy. Umm...yeah. That's kind of all I got from these two lectures that I've listened to this afternoon. Oh gosh, I'm pretty much done for aren't I?

Revision Week: Day 4

So, today is big brother's birthday! We're getting so old. Haha!

Happy Birthday Big Brother GREG!!!!

Over the course of the day I have knocked my bowl of cereal onto my carpeted floor (which led to the discovery that wet Wheetabix is really hard to get off of the floor), fell off of the stair leading up to my flat, ran into a doorway, and fell asleep at the computer while studying. What has all of this led me to do? Take a long break.

I think I've discovered something. There is such a thing as over studying and not giving yourself enough down time. Now, I've been giving myself down time after studying in the afternoon. But I've been up at 7am every morning since Monday and have been studying for 6 hours a day. I guess I never fully understood "over studying". Did you know that you can do it before the night right before the exam?! But today, I just studying for 4 hours and I'm going to let myself sleep for as long as I need tonight. *smile*

Right well...
6 days until the English exam
7 days until the Psychology exam

Let's go to spoken speech recognition. "There are a few models which try to explain how humans can process and understand speech. One of these theories is called the Cohort Model. A "cohort" is a group of possible words a word can be before you figure out what the word is. Let me try to explain that a little better. Within the Cohort Model model there is something called the "uniqueness point." The uniqueness point is the point where that word can only be that word. Some words have early uniqueness points and others have late uniqueness points. Words with early uniqueness point are easier to identify if speech gets distorted in any way. This uniqueness point is what the Cohort Model is based around. Basically, if you hear the sound /c/ your mind thinks of a million words that start with the sound /c/ (like cat, cabbage, carrot, crate, crab, etc.) Then you hear the /ca/ sound, so your mind eliminates the words that don't fit with that sound and you're left with those words that do. Then you finally hear /cat/ and you're left with only one word that can be. The word "cat" has a late uniqueness point. There are early and late models. The main difference between these two models is that early versions believe that we use top-down processing (we use the context to help in word recognition) and later versions believe we use bottom-up processing (it's all data driven)."

Odd question to ask...does that make any sense? I'm trying to figure out how I would explain the Cohort Model if it came up in a Short Answer Question in the exam.

Revision Week: Day 3

So, last night as I was walking home from a movie night with friends after a full day of studying I thought of something. I saw a father walking with his two children toss his cigarette aside without putting it out. Let's, for a second, ignore my issues with the whole "smoking around children" thing and focus on what it actually made me think of. He didn't step on it or throw water over it or anything. For a second I was really confused. If he didn't put that out completely he ran the risk of starting a fire right there on the sidewalk. Didn't he?

Well, maybe not. I live in the boring, icky part of California. It's hot nice months out of the twelve and always dry. It's dry heat and dry cold. Basically, it sucks. And everything is flammable. You know all those fires on the highway in LA? Well, I'm fairly certain that 99% of them start because careless people decide to throw their still lit cigarettes out of their car windows. But Aberdeen is definitely not as dry as where I live. It's wet and rainy twelve out of twelve months so...would he be completely wrong not to put out his cigarette? I'm not sure anymore. He's wrong on the account that he's littering, but he probably wouldn't have started a fire on the sidewalk. I do know that if he ever goes to California he might inadvertently start a fire. Lesson of the day: Put out your cigarettes and dispose of them in an appropriate manner.

These are the things I think about when studying. Anywho, I did my usual 6 hours of studying this morning.
7 days until the English exam (that's one week!!!!)
8 days until the Pyschology exam

"We all can lip read. We may not think we can, but we do. In fact, we do it everyday as a tool to use when processing speech. We use a lot of tools to help in speech processing and there is evidence to suggest that we also use the visual as well. The evidence is in the McGurk effect. The McGurk effect is, basically, when you hear something when watching the person and something different when you're not watching the person. If you watch someone saying "ga ga" you will hear "ga ga", but if you don't watch them you will hear "ba ba". Visual information helps so much with processing speech when it is muffled or deteriorated in any way. We don't depend solely on visual information to understand speech, but it is a useful tool." 

Revision Week: Day 2

So continues the exciting saga of Erin's revision week before exams. I have to say, I don't think I'll ever get use to this whole exams after winter break thing. Though, I'm surprisingly more prepared this year. I've actually studied. Sign of maturity?

Anyway:

8 days until the English exam
9 days until the Psychology exam

"There is evidence that infants can not only imitate facial expressions but can understand the emotions behind them. In a study, infants were tested to see if they could understand emotions. The experimenter first got the child use to passing objects back and forth. Then the child was presented with a bowl of broccoli and a bowl of fish crackers (you know...the snack the smiles back). The child was encouraged to choose a snack to eat. Inevitably, the child would choose to chow down on the fish crackers. After the child has sometime to eat their snack the experimenter would take the two bowls. He tried a bit of broccoli and made a pleased face with satisfied "yum" noises. Then he tried a fish cracker. He looked disgusted and made "yucky" noises. He then passed the two bowls back to the child and asked them if they could give him something to eat. In most, but not all cases, the child will eventually pass him a bit of broccoli. This provides evidence that young children can use facial expressions to guide their own social interactions." There are videos to go along with this of babies who "pass" and "fail" this test. There was one we watched which was absolutely hilarious. This little girl looks at the experimenter as if to say, "Really?! You want this!?" Adorable.

But quite possibly the most important thing I have learned (or revised I should say) today is something my lecturer said during the original lecture. "If you give broccoli and fish crackers to a child they will never eat the broccoli." Life lessons right there.

Revisions Week: Day 1

For revision week (well, really 9 days) I've decided to post something every day that was part of my studying. I'm hoping this makes everything stick in my head even more.

Revision Week: Day 1
9 days until the English exam
10 days until the Psychology exam

Children gain a better understanding of their own mental abilities as they age. If you were to ask a young child what they could expect themselves to remember when learning a list of words they would overestimate by quite a bit. They would average about 3 more items than they would really remember. As children grow up they begin to be more realistic as to how many items they can remember. By about age 10 children are not far off when guessing how many items they are able to remember. They still overestimate, but only by around one item.

Waiting for Impending Doom

So, I got the time wrong for this morning's English exam. It's not actually this morning. It's at noon today. Essentially, I got up early for no real reason and left the house a little over 3 hours earlier than I needed to. I decided not to go home, but instead I am here in the Hub waiting for the exam to start. I did spend and hour reading one of the books I should have read already for the exam. It's only a backup book, so it's alright that I haven't finished all of it...right?

Here's what I can expect during this exam. There will be 2 sections. The first section there will be 3 questions to choose from and I am to pick one and write about it. I can use 3 of the books that were on the last section of the course (the "Race" section). These books include Doris Lessings "The Grass is Singing", Joseph Conrad's "Heart of Darkness" and Chinua Achebe's (I think I spelled that name correctly) "Things Fall Apart". I've chosen Lessings as my first choice and Conrad as my second. See, I had to read HoD last year for High School and I don't want to have to write another essay on it. Especially not an eassy where I only have an hour to write. The second section there will be another 3 questions to choose from and, again, I am to pick 1 question and write on it. I can choose any book from the course as long as I have not yet written an essay on it. That ruled out "Maus" and "A Doll's House" for me. So, I picked Arthur Miller's "The Crucible". I'll use "Lolita" if the question I choose is not suitable for "The Crucible". I'll have 2 hours to write these two essays. It's a scary bit of business is final exams.

All I can say is that I wish that the exam would start already because the faster it starts the faster it'll finish.

The Start of Revision Week

Today starts revision week. This means that we have no classes for the whole week and that exams will start next week. My first exam is my English exam on May 27. Well, technically, my first exam was today. Today was my Gaelic Oral Exam and I've been told that I did very well. I know that there are at least 2 questions where I didn't get any points, but out of 20 questions that doesn't worry me at all.

So, what is my plan for the next week as I don't have classes. Well, every day I'm going to work on my Psychology report which is due in on Friday. I have two psychology courses and my practical course does not have a final exam. The final grade is based on our two practical reports (the first one I got an 18) and the MCQs. I'm hoping that I will do as amazing on this report as I did on the last report because I'm haven't done particularly well on the MCQs. I'm also going to choose the books I'm going to use for the English exam and reread them (or read them for the first time...). Finally, for an hour or two a day, I'm going to work very hard on Gaelic. Last semester I got a 17 on the final exam and I'm really hoping for an 18-20 this semester.

Now, you may be asking, "Erin, if you have such big plans for your grades this semester then why are you spending time writing on this blog that apparently no one reads?" That's a very good question and I shall tell you the truthful answer. I'm writing on the blog because I've been working on my practical report for the past hour and I had trouble starting off the introduction so I decided to take a little break so that my brain can relax for just a little and forget about having to write eloquently or grammatically correct. That's right people, I don't really put effort into these posts that you wait for.

I also thought I would tell you guys that Lisa and I are signing the lease this evening. Hooray! Once we've signed this piece of paper we will not have to worry at all about housing for us. We'll be helping Marlene and Amy throughout the week as we're hoping to find them a flat nearish to us.

Well, That's all from me for now. I'm going to continue working on the introduction for my report. Perhaps tomorrow, if you're all very good little bloggers, then I shall tell you what the report is about.

Last Week

Well, we've come to the last week of classes. Next week is revision week and then starts final exams. I can't believe how quick this first year seems to have gone. It seems like just yesterday I had no idea where to find the MacRobert Building (the MacRobert Building is the one I see from my window everyday :P) and I couldn't find my way into or out of town without using the major streets. Now I obviously know where the MacRobert Building is and I frequently use back roads instead of major streets. I still don't know the city half as well as I would like to, but I suppose that'll come with being here just a little longer.

I keep telling myself that this last week will be over quicker than I think it will be and soon I'll be sitting in my exams. Even though I keep telling myself that I can't seem to motivate myself to work or review. I'm blaming it on the unusually pleasant weather we've been having.

It is a little surreal though. In about a month I'll be back home in the States for the summer holiday. In less than a month my last exam of first year will be over. Seriously...surreal.

A New Term

I finished my exams this Thursday. Art History wasn't as easy as I expected it to be, but it wasn't super hard either. I know I passed, but there was one question that I could nothing but BS my way through it. I had never seen the building before and I hate seeing the sketches of buildings on the overhead screen projector. I really can't tell what the building is. But, oh well. That's the way the cookie crumbles sometimes right?

My new term starts this Monday and I still don't have a timetable. It's getting quite frustrating. I'm trying to take a Psychology course or two this semestre. It should be fun if I ever get my timetable up. They want me to start signing up for tutorials but I can't do that until I get my timetable so I know when NOT to sign up for the tutorials. It's all very annoying, but I suppose it should definitely be up by Sunday right? At least, I hope it's up by Sunday.

First University Exam

Today is my first exam. I'll be honest, I haven't studied for this one as much as for the others. Just about everything is easier to study for than Linguistics. I sat down yesterday with the good intention of studying a little, just to refresh my mind, and I thought, "What the heck am I suppose to study?" So I ended up looking at the last class Power Point just to get my brain in the mood of communication. Since I missed the last class, and my professor never emailed me the practice exam like he said he would, I really don't know what to expect. I'm not all that worried though. My friend sat me down yesterday to help me with writing essays in the style expected in the UK and the first thing he wrote underneath the heading of "Exam Help" was "It is impossible for you to fail first year." When I gave him that quizzical look he said that it wasn't impossible is was just highly unlikely. Actually we did find out that it was impossible for me to fail my English course unless I didn't sit the exam...which I'm not planning on doing. After that I decided to see what I needed in all of my other courses and it is ACTUALLY impossible for me to fail my History of Art and my Gaelic courses as well as long as I write something down on the paper. I couldn't figure it out for Linguistics though because I have no idea what I got on my essay. Sure, I could have gone to the school office to pick up my essay (it was handed back after I was already back in the States), but I really just couldn't be bothered. I didn't want a good essay mark to inflate my head into thinking that I didn't have to study or a bad mark getting me all depressed before the exam. That would have caused me to stress and then to poorly in the exam because of the stress. So, I'm going to go into it with only enough of me caring to write something intelligent on the paper.

Wish me Luck!

Study, Study, Study, Study...

I really hate the system of having finals after winter holiday. Everyone goes into the break with the best intentions of studying at least a little every day. This, of course, never happens. I know my plan was to reread most of the English books and do an exercise from the Gaelic workbook everyday just to keep my mind going. That lasted about a day. So, now my days are filled with trying to remember the main point of "Confessions and Memoirs of a Justified Sinner" and the narrative style of "A Study in Scarlet". Not to mention the fact that I'm trying to read the few pages of each book I skipped (yeah, I know, I shouldn't have done that, but some of the chapters didn't seem too important to the book as a whole...especially in "At Swim-Two-Birds"). I'm also translating at least 10 sentences a day while working on vocabulary and the paradigms in Gaelic. Today I have a study session in Art History which will *hopefully* help me remember some of the technical terms used. Darn University...

By the way, yesterday was my brother's birthday and I meant to post about it, but I was more or less busy all day. I did my Wordless Wednesday on my other blog, but forgot to come over here and post. So, HAPPY BIRTHDAY to the bestest Big Brother ever!

This is actually the only recent picture I have of my brother that shows his face. He doesn't like taking pictures so much. Anyway, this is us at my dad and step-mom's big wedding this past summer. Greg is the only male in the group.