An Update on University Life

It’s been almost two months since my last post, and I wanted to give y’all an update on how university life has been. One thing I’d like to say before I get started is that I have missed writing so much! It’s been hard to find time for myself and classwork has always taken higher priority, which I’m not fully proud of, but that’s life.

At the time of writing this post, I have been a university student for 85 days, or 2 months and 25 days, and there are 16 more days till the last final test of my first semester, after which the winter break starts. I’m so excited for the break because UofT extended it by a week at our request XD. There was a literal petition for it. So cool!

Getting to the update, I feel like the past three months have zipped past way too quickly. It was just orientation week a second ago and now I’m studying for my first final exams of university.

Note: I have included some of the marks I have gotten on tests so far. They are not all my marks, they are not weighed the same, and they are not meant to be a way for me to brag (although there isn't much to brag about). Their only purpose is to let you know that your marks in high school have nothing to do with your marks in university. Good marks in high school get you into university but they are not that great a predictor of your performance in university. Regardless of how good or bad you are/were in high school, university is a completely new journey with very different assessment methods and grading systems. Along with being new, it’s unpredictable. Things can go either way and you just have to take it and keep going. One bad mark (or a few) is not the end of the world and you can always do better. Go easy on yourself. You are doing your best.

Here are how the past 3 months have been:

September was extremely chill, with barely any assignments, not tests and only a bit of weekly homework to finish along with watching/attending lectures. It was all about getting to know our professors, understanding our courses and taking our time to adjust to the new environment. I took advantage of how much time I had and attended workshops and club meetings and made a couple of study groups myself. September was still early on in the semester but I made the mistake of thinking things were going to stay the same, all easy and fun. I diligently attended every lecture, every meeting, every workshop I had, and most of them with my camera on XD. Spoiler alert: I haven't gotten ready for a class, with makeup and cute outfits, since September ended.

The most exciting thing to happen in September was that I ordered my iPad Pro! I had been debating getting one since July (but had wanted one since the lockdown started) because I wasn’t sure of just how much work I'd have. Would it just be me annotating on slides and doing a lot of practice problems or would there be more to write than that? So, till the end of September, I did all my work in my paper notebooks and that became super tedious, very quickly. I was wasting so much ink printing slides to write on, and spending so much time drawing diagrams by hand in my notes, it made watching lectures a chore for me.

Finally, on September 22nd, all fed up with the extra work I was having to do, I ordered the iPad Pro. Apple was having a back-to-school sale, and that got me a sweet discount, so the iPad fit right into my budget. I bought the 12.9" Silver iPad with 256 GB storage space, along with the Pencil. The sale also meant I would get Air Pods for free with my purchase, which was cool. I think I'll write about my iPad sometime soon.

October was the exact opposite of September, with the only exciting part being the long-awaited arrival of my iPad. Our professors expected us to be well-adjusted to our classes by now, so our workload increased drastically. We had our first big tests and quizzes, lab sessions and lab reports, and lengthy assignments that had no reason being a part of the course load. The first Biology test was a breeze for me (I got a 25/26) but the first Chemistry test was meh (13/18) and the first Math written quiz was horrible (13/24. Barely passed).

(The Math quizzes were divided into three: Reflection, MCQ and Written, with each week having a different type of quiz. The reflection quizzes had barely any math involved, the MCQs were the only objectively marked assessment in the course and the written quizzes were for sure meant to drive you out of the course.)

The lab reports for Chemistry were divided into prelab and lab reports, both of which took at least 2 hours each. The Biology lab sessions were 3 hours long, every other week and my biggest fear was falling asleep during the class because, somehow, I always managed to screw up my sleep schedule by Wednesday and would wake up 5 minutes before the lab. In Math, our big assignments were the Applied Communications Tasks, sort of a way for the profs to see if we knew how to relate Math to the real world, and the first one made me cry because I didn’t know how to come up with a realistic model of the population of Toronto 1, 5, 30 and 80 years from now. I got a perfect score on the assignment, eventually, but it was a headache to finish. I submitted it exactly a second before I thought it was due, only to find out the next day that the deadline had been extended by 25 hours.

The second Biology test was meh (23/31 but there was a +3 adjustment so I won't complain), the second Chemistry test was a flop (8.8/18) and the second Math written quiz was easy, but I still got a question wrong (13/20). This was also the time we started doing Acids, Bases and Equilibrium in Chemistry, which has never been my strong suit. It was quite hard not knowing what was going on and having pretty much no access to good help. The Organic Chemistry Tutor on YouTube saved my life.

Because everything was becoming so overwhelmingly hard, I decided to drop the politics course I took. It had weekly assignments that demanded critical thinking skills that I clearly didn’t have at the time, so I had to prioritize my mental health and let go of the course. I do miss the lectures a bit – they were informational – but the assignments will not be missed.

I can say that, with 4 courses, life is a bit easier and I don't regret dropping POL101.

November started off stressful. It was a continuation of the horror October was, but things got better during and after the one-week break we got- we call it our Reading Week. It's a week of no lectures, synchronous or asynchronous, and no assignments or homework due during that week. The break helped me catch up on all of my pending work and get a head start on the work that was due in the future. I finished all of it in the first 4 days of the break and took the rest of the week off. I watched so many movies and tv shows XD. I genuinely enjoyed the break, and I am ready to petition that we have one such break every month.

I definitely had a lot more work to do in November compared to September and October because we were so close to the end of the semester and this was when profs realized they still hadn’t given us half our work yet. But the head start I got from the break helped me get through till the end of November. I was able to finish everything I wrote in my to-do journal each week (another cool thing I now have because of my iPad), with no carryovers to the next week. I developed a schedule September Aarushi would have died to have. The gist of it was to do homework over the weekends and lectures during the week, sort of like in high school, because, mentally, that's where I still am.

The third Biology test was good (24/28), the third Chemistry test was awesome (16/18) and I still haven't gotten my mark for the third Math written quiz. But it doesn't matter because all the Math quizzes have blended together, and I only choose to remember the reflection quizzes because I get perfect scores on them.

I don’t think I have mentioned Psychology anywhere in this post, so I’ll talk a bit about that. I am thoroughly enjoying this course because of the content and the professor. It's one lecture per week, with no assignments or homework. I'm loving it the most out of all my courses. The tests haven't been too bad (47.5/56 and 48/58) but I certainly can do better in the final.

We’re in December now. Very close to the end of the first semester. I have had my last Biology and Chemistry lab sessions and well as the last Chemistry synchronous and asynchronous lectures. I just have two Biology lectures to watch next week and a Math problem-solving session and then we’ll be done with the lecture part of this semester. I have one last Math assignment and one last Chemistry lab report to submit and I think I’ll get most of that work done this weekend. I have two more Math quizzes and the final tests for the other three courses. The last one is on the 19th, it’s Chemistry, and then I’ll be free to enjoy my winter break.

I think I might still study during the break to get a head start on the second semester because idle hands make me anxious.

Thank you for reading this post and sticking around while I tried to get used to the university setting. I’m really hoping I can finish some posts about each individual class because, regardless of how hard they were, they were quite interesting to be a part of. Maybe I’ll post them during my break, or at least after my exams. Till my next post, toodles - Aarushi