So, What Have I Actually Been Doing For the Past Half Year? - Part 2

December 20, 2007

Okay, so its time to answer the question. The middle break was quite a good one, I finally got to play a decent amount of games, I spent a decent amount of time with friends and worked a bit in preparation for this new store. I also set up a new blog; success in the Digital Life and wrote 20 articles to post on the site. This was eventually canned due to time constraints.

Something that became apparent to me in the first month at Uni was that they whole community vibe from school last year wasn’t there. I no longer had someone on my shoulder every minute of the day to talk to. This really bothered me because it was so comforting. I also needed to improve my Chinese, I had lost my nack over the Christmas holiday break and still, by one semester in hadn’t got it back yet. The lack of contact hours at Uni also frustrated me, because I finished earlier than my friends and often wasted more time going home earlier and missing the afternoon express trains. I wanted to fix all of these niggling problems and become busy and ‘on the ball’ again. Although I was enjoying Uni life at the time I don’t think that I was getting 100% out of it. So first week pack, I decided to fix these problems.

This week was a fantastic week, I managed to fix all of these problems and regained the ‘community’ feel back into my Uni life. I began catching up with one of my Chinese friends for a few hours to practice language together. On the way back from Uni one day I saw a Chinese guy listening to his iPod with the song names and title all in Chinese. I’d also been looking for some Chinese music at the time so I introduced myself and asked if he had any suggestions. We were talking for a little while and he gave me his email in the end. A day or two later he emailed me and we had planned to meet up to practice during the week. Unfortunately I could not meet my friend on the first day that we had planned to meet because my other chinese friend had some serious accommodation problems that I needed to help her fix. But eventually we started practicing. We generally practice together for about 6-8 hours a week, during the afternoons, this fixed the traveling issue substantially, helped me improve my Chinese and made me feel on the ball again. With this I also practiced with my other friend as well, so it each week I got about 8hrs of extra practice in and as a result this fixed most of the other problems that I was having.

I also made a few overall lifestyle changes which helped this move as well. In the second semester I did less linguistics and more design work. Infact one of my design courses was a second year course (thats 2 second year courses I studied that semester). Because my design courses were more advanced I had more free choice and opinion. Instead of being bound to lame practicals with tedious constraints, I got to focus more on creative output. This also meant that I began to not dislike my design tutor, in fact she was a fantastic help during the semester.

This part of my life wasn’t great just because of these things though. I was now working in a more relaxed working environment where I got my customer respect. E3 was on around that time (I get really excited about E3). Makes me remember my roots.

Also because of E3 I had some fantastic opportunities to write my best content yet for the gaming blog. I am still very proud of the Resident Evil 5 trailer analysis posts.

This set up pretty much formed the base for the second semester. From here things just got better, design classes became fun as I got to use my own photography work and selected themes. I became better friends with most of the people at Uni and very good friends with my Chinese buddies. I started enjoying my Chinese classes more as the extra help allowed me to understand the work better.

I feel as though that week helped formed the base of a successful semester which has followed on to a more cheerful year.

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