So, What Have I Actually Been Doing For the Past Half Year? – Part 1

December 12, 2007

Before I answer that question I’m going to talk briefly about how the first semester went, skipping past the first 2 months. By that time I had gotten over a major dilemma which was bothering me substantially. I wasn’t sure if I should be studying Chinese or if I should study design. With this I also had a few other pressing issues going in which weren’t making this any easier.

As you might have guessed I decided to study Chinese which looking back was the safest and best choice. I don’t regret that decision.

Looking back, the first semester in several ways wasn’t all that great. One of the linguistics courses that I was studying I downright hated, it just seemed pretty worthless. Although linguistics makes up a decent chunk of my program, some of the courses/topics are just pathetically weak.

I also wasn’t having much fun with inDesign in my design course, the work was o so tedious.>< I think that because of this I became unfairly frustrated with my design tutor. Chinese was my favourite course but man I struggled a bit along the way. I spent the majority of my study time on Chinese.

Throughout the semester I’d continually get this feeling that I was all over the place. The thing is, what I do at Uni means that I don’t have a lot of contact hours, I’m also located at two different Universities. Back then I also had Thursdays off as well which was usually dedicated to working on my linguistics. The way it worked out was that I spent more time traveling to and from Uni as I started and finished quite often in the middle of the day (less express trains). So the small amount of contact hours meant that I only saw my home University friends twice a week and switching between Universities meant that I saw less of the same people. So it kinda felt that I was never at one place long enough to be settle. Although on Fridays us boys that went to school together would meet up and go out somewhere, we’d also spend a few weekends catching up too.

Around this time the retail store that I was working for at the time was preparing to transform itself as the store was bought by another retailer. So this there was a lot of uncertainty around this time of the year.

What I have said above doesn’t paint a very positive picture does it? I want to stress that these are just the bits that sucked about the first semester. There were a number of highlights, obviously fitting into University life is an achievement.

I also managed to surprise myself a few weeks in with how many friends I’d actually made. Further more last year I would have never thought that 80% of my University friends would be female. It turns out that they are which I still find somewhat surprising due to my nerdish qualities.

I also managed to kick start my blog, instead of writing about me I wrote about games and produced a few decent articles.

On the whole the first semester was good, not outstandingly fantastic but still good.