Convocation

It's hard to believe it. But I'm finally convocating. Well, not right now but pretty soon. Beginning of June pretty soon. After all these years, the course mishaps and delays, the sleepless nights, the stupid debt, and unhealthy stress, its come down to this moment. This was what it was all for.

A piece of paper that says I have achieved an undergraduate degree Specializing in Psychology.

Go me?

I've made a few mistakes already. For example, I didn't realize that there was a deadline for renting a gown and cap. I fired off an email to see what could be done. And turns out I was able to get it at the bookstore on Campus with barely any a hassle on my end.

I also grabbed the convocation package which has information, my parchment, name tag, and guest tickets. I get 2 tickets so obviously my parents get one each. I get to keep the little hat, but the gown and hood gets returned.

These rental people must make a ton of money. Seriously, $40 per person with over 6000 people is over $24000 in just 2 weeks is ridiculous. Plus, they just re-use the gowns next year.

Close enough.

So convocation morning finally arrives. It's pouring rain. Everyone else got nice sunny days but I get pouring rain. I'm actually ok with this, I hate the sun, it burns my skin. Plus, the people who convocated in the afternoon got heavy rain storms.

So I sat, in my seat for about 2 and a half hours, listening to speeches, waiting for every one of the graduates to get their hand shaken by some people, more speeches, fairly boring.

And then my fellow Psych graduate shares an interesting story with me. Flashback, about 2 years ago. I'm struggling to try and apply to an internship program but didn't get in due to being over the credit limit.

The following year, my Psych friend goes through the same routine. Failed to get in the previous year, tried to get in again, gets approval from the dean, other coordinators, etc. etc..

 And the stupid cow let him in. He got an internship.

I need to flip something in my rage.

So, I guess this petty coordinator just didn't like me and directly tried to screw me over. I'm pretty disgruntled right now. I'm not going to let this stand, I'm hoping I can find some indirect way to get back at this woman.

Not happy with her actions at all.

Still! I convocated, the reception afterwards had some decent food. I'm fairly happy (asides from learning about the treacherous coordinator) and I should be proud.

Now let's hope I can get a good job.

Preperations

Summer has only begun and already I'm sitting around trying to figure out things for after summer has come to an end. Can't afford to dawdle, because it's too easy to sit back, relax, and boom! All the time you suddenly had is gone. Also, it's also common for unexpected events to occur that suddenly eat up all your free time.

I wouldn't be surprised if my family decided to take another month long trip to Asia again. This time my Dad has been hinting at going to Korea. Most of us are fairly hesitant because of North Korea being absolutely crazy. But that might change and we'll head somewhere else, who knows.

In the meantime, one of the best motivational messages I've taken to heart as of late is the following:

And so I'll begin my work today. Starting with planning for my academic future. At the moment I have 3 options I'm considering: Graduate studies in Psychology, Speech Pathology, or something in Business.

Unfortunately if I want to continue doing Psychology, I'll have to abandon my province, probably head to Saskatchewan. As I've mentioned before the budget cuts have NOT been kind to anyone. Psychology has lost several support staff and I highly doubt they can afford another graduate student.

Though we fared better than Sociology and Anthropology which had to fuse together to stay afloat.

Speech Pathology is another one in which I'll probably have to abandon my province for as well and also to Saskatchewan. Again, the program in my city is extremely competitive and I doubt my GPA can withstand the scrutiny. Seriously, the only benefit I have is that I'm male, and maybe they'll let me in because of how saturated the field is with women.

Or maybe they're all sexist and that's why there are so few men.

Though I'm not sure Speech Pathology is such a good option. It would require me to take more Linguistics and while it wasn't that bad, my friend's girlfriend is a Linguistics major and she had only one piece of advice for me:

"Linguistics is terrible. Look at these notes, look at them. Don't subject yourself to this.".

Ok, so what about Business? An MBA (Master's in Business Administration) requires that I write not only the GMAT but also have 2 years of experience working full-time. Unfortunately as much as I'd like a well-paying full-time job, I haven't been that lucky. But who knows, maybe I'll run into something so good that I won't want to head back to class in the Fall.

In the meantime, a BCOM (Bachelor's in Commerce) while only a second undergraduate degree, only needs me to take Econ 101 and 102. It's only 2 years long. AND that opens me up to all the beautiful internships in the field. And from what I've seen, the Business students have no end of awesome internships.

Something that Psychology failed me on.

 This is relevant to my interests.

So I guess I'll be aiming at taking Econ 101, Econ 102, maybe a higher level Linguistics course? Maybe another Psychology course for interests sake? I don't want to take more than 3 courses, but we'll see what happens.

But the course registration site is always really iffy on the weekends so I'll have to wait until Monday to try and sign up. In the meantime, I have my projects to work on. I know that I'm vague on the works in progress but it's because I don't enjoy talking about things that aren't completed or unsuccessful. It's a pride thing.

I know I keep saying things look like they're about to work (Project Derp is especially notorious for this) and it's true. They show promise, but they all still need a lot work still before I would consider it a success. I think the best analogy I can come up with is finally being able to properly boil a pot of pasta. Good for you! But you still have a ways to go until this becomes acceptable spaghetti carbenera.

So I'll keep working on my projects, online profiles, job hunts, and my two part-time jobs. Especially my projects. I want to have an update where I have more to talk about as opposed to "STILL WORKING ON IT".

Back to classes

Welp, the break could only last so long. And now we're back. Back to the school. Yay. No, really. I'm exploding with enthusiasm here. There's nothing I enjoy than pulling all-nighters and then falling asleep at the front of the class and then drooling on myself.

Not exactly my finest moment.

If you were Asian and male maybe you could be me.

I'm technically done. You know, now that I've got my degree and everything. Unfortunately, these days an undergraduate degree doesn't get you anywhere because nearly everyone has one. So that means we have to upgrade to a graduate degree.

And to do that, I need to do various per-requisite courses to even qualify for some of them. I need at least 4 more courses for Speech and Language Pathology. But taking into consideration what my prof said, maybe I should start looking into Marketing as well.

Which means taking some Economics courses.

This is my understanding of Economics.

I've also been looking into jumping provinces for grad school. But because my grades hover around the B level (as opposed to people with As who can go anywhere) I might have to go to Saskatchewan. For people who don't know the run-downs of the provinces of Canada, it's basically this:

British Columbia: Asians and the ocean.

Alberta: Oil and Canada's rednecks.

Saskatchewan: Flat lands and Native Americans.

Manitoba: Lakes or something?

Ontario: Capital of Canada and Niagra falls.

Quebec: Crazy French people.

Nova Scotia: Fish.

Prince Edward Island: Funny accents and potatoes.

Newfoundland: Fish and funny accents.

New Brunswick: More funny accents.

Yukon/Northwest Territories/Nunavut: Native Americans and cold.

Fellow Canadians may have deduced my home province based on these partially incorrect stereotypes.

In the meantime, I'll be taking Linguistics courses and a friend of mine looped me into a MWF Sociology course which killed my 4 day weekend. I don't even need this course, I really wanted a lax term but my parents kept hounding me claiming that unless my schedule was fuller I'd be wasting my time and my life. And so I caved in and added another course to my schedule.

Ian, this course better be the GPA booster you claim it is. I gave up my 4-day weekend for this.

One Month of Classes

So I've been back to University for a month now and I think I have a pretty good run-down of each of my Psychology courses. I'm actually taking nothing but Psychology which is nice even if it is 4 classes crammed onto a single day.

Let's take a look shall we? In alphabetical order:

Aging Psychology

This class, is easy. A lot of it is disorders or events that happen to people as they grow older and how they're affected. Maybe it's just because the class has just started but I find it kind of obvious that if a person has arthritis/incontinence/cataracts, they become more dependent on others and can become depressed by this.

Really, the only thing I've learned from this course so far is that people in nursing homes are often unintentionally jerks, and glare is scary to patients with Alzheimer's. Apparently it looks like water or something to them.

I mean, I finished the midterm in 15 minutes, and then stayed an extra 15 minutes just to be certain of everything. I hope the class stays this easy, and I hope she continues to bake us food for each class.

No problem.

Cognitive Psychology

The exact opposite of Aging Psychology. This course is possibly one of the most dense Psych courses I've ever taken. Every week we are given a quiz on one concept from one the chapters of the textbook.

That's not so bad, except when the text is 50 pages of stuff like this:

The arbitrariness of symbols, and the multiple realization of universal machines, is rooted in the relative notion of universal machine. By definition, a machine is universal if it can simulate any other universal machine (Newell, 1980).

Or:

The phrase marker for a sentence can be illustrated as an upside-down tree whose structure is grown from the root node S (for sentence). The application of the rewrite rule S → NP VP produces the first layer of the Figure 3-6 phrase marker, showing how the nodes NP (noun phrase) and VP (verb phrase) are grown from S.

Or:

In a dissociation, an injury to one region of the brain disrupts one kind of processing, but leaves another unaffected, suggesting that the two kinds of processing are separate, and are associated with different brain areas.

Keep in mind that all of those excerpts were from the same chapter. Cognitive psychology claims it's an interdisciplinary science, so that means that in any given chapter I'm faced with Computing Science, Philosophy, Neuroscience, English grammar, and a sprinkling of Psychology.

Oh and those quizzes I mentioned? Yeah, one random question every week on any one of those concepts. Lots of fun this course.

Conservation Psychology

I'm convinced now that we as a species are doomed. I mean, I knew that there were a lot of problems with how we treated the planet but just seeing how much damage has been done (and how little is being fixed and rectified) is really frightening. I'd need to dedicate an entire blog post to cover everything.

It boils down to humanity is consuming too much, and there are hidden environmental costs to everything we consume. I honestly don't think we can change our mentalities anytime soon but I still have the rest of the course to decide on that.

We're doomed.

Social Influences

Yeah, I don't really have much to say about this class. I also fall asleep the most in this class. I'm not sure if that's more indicative of me or the class itself. Nothing really new has been discussed that hasn't been discussed in my previous classes.

I remain hopeful.

Oops.

And from the looks of things I'll be taking a few more courses in the Winter term. I'm missing a few per-requisites for the Master's program I want to get into so, wish me luck with that as well.

It never ends.

My Final Schedule

So my schedule has been finalized for this term. Which is good. Unfortunately I wasn't able to get into that one class that I wanted. And talking to the Administration revealed that there were over a hundred people on the wait list and it was a first come first serve basis.

One spot opened up after about half a week and it was gone within 15 minutes, maybe less. With these kinds of odds, I decided I was better off trying to get into another class.

But I refused to give up my 4 day weekend. Thus I am now taking another course in Cognitive psychology. It's not so bad so far, nothing too interesting.

My other 3 Psychology courses are Aging psychology, Social influences, and Conservation psychology. Aging psychology is pretty self-explanatory. Exact opposite of Child psychology, we are now looking at how people age and the changes that occur. Social influences is going to have us looking at how other people try to convince and sway us into doing various things.

It's amazing how people can be manipulated.

The last one is a bit weird and is kind of a new course. My professor believes that the heart of any conservation effort needs to take a look at humans and how we think in regards to conservation. Think about it, bluefin tuna aren't jumping onto our plates to be eaten nor are whale hunting themselves to death. They're dying because they're a "commodity". Rainforests and marshes aren't clearing themselves away either.

No matter what angle you look at it, our attitudes towards nature is what has caused so much destruction. You don't need a biologist to tell you that all is not well with our environment. And my professor wants to see if we even have the capacity to change the way people see conservation, because clearly what we're doing isn't near enough.

Eeyup.

Last thing before I close this post up. I think I may have finally figured out what I want to do with this Psychology degree. There's some sort of career conference in the upcoming weeks and if I like what I see, I'll go right into it if possible. I have most of the course requirements already but if I do decide to enroll in this Master's program I'll need to take a few more courses in the following term.

Best of luck to me.

The First Week of Classes

So the first week of classes has begun much to my dismay. No more sitting around and relaxing, nope, it's back to being crammed in a room and time to learn.

It's not all that bad. I'm mostly interested in my classes and they don't seem to strenuous at the moment, all Psychology related. 3 classes on Tuesday and Thursday and 1 class on Wednesday evening. Not bad. Especially considering that Wednesday's class is a lower level Abnormal Psychology course. I took a higher level one a few terms ago so I expected this one to be a breeze.

Maybe I'll just skip class and reuse my old notes.

And then I'm told I shouldn't have been allowed to register for said class.

Yep, turns out that I only got into the course due to some computer glitch. The two courses are essentially the same or something. I'll go talk to someone about this but in the meantime I better find a different course.

I decide to try and fit into another Tuesday/Thursday Psychology course. It didn't seem that amazing or all that special. It's currently full but I'm hoping someone will drop it and I can claim their spot.

And then the prof. mentions that all exams (including the final) are going to be take home.

Yeah, so now I REALLY want to get into this class but who's going to drop it now? It is possible to ask professors to let you into their course and generally they accept.

Unfortunately our class is in this dinky classroom and you're legally not allowed to exceed the max capacity. Fire safety issues and what not. All I can do is hope someone is crazy enough to drop the course so I can steal it.

So I've been brooding over my laptop all week. Constantly checking my email for an opening.

Basically.

I mean, yeah, I could just take any other course BUT I am determined to maintain my 4 day weekend.
And if I get into this class, it means I get Wednesday off too. So it's almost like a 5 day weekend.

I am more than ok with that. 9AM to 6PM twice a week. Feels pretty good.

So wish me luck. One of my Psych buddies Don is thinking of possibly dropping the course and if he does, I'll be on it like a hawk.

A Chain Reaction of Problems

I return for the final term of my Psychology degree in the fall. Then I can finally get a piece of paper and be about 10 grand in debt. Lots of fun to be had. Especially considering I still have no idea what I want to do once I've gotten said degree.

I registered for my courses way back in June before I left for vacation to China. So, imagine my surprise when I returned home and found out that I had been kicked out of all of my courses.

And my program.

Pretty much my expression.

And a few phone calls later, I finally get my answer and the problem.

Anyone who has followed my blog for a few months will remember the problem I had last year. What happened was I didn't have enough courses to stay within my Psychology program. To solve this, several coordinators managed to shove me into 2 courses halfway through the term.

Why did I not have enough courses? Well, I was over the course limit for an Internship program I was trying to get into again. So I reduced my course load to try and get in. But as some of you may know, I didn't get in, and only put my degree at risk.

The reasoning was that if the person in charge let someone into the program that was over the course limit, it challenged the integrity of the program. Some nonsense like that.

Unrelated note, it's also sort of due to that same person that 1/5th of us didn't get an internship the first time around because she took more students than internships.

I imagine I've confused a lot of you right now.

Anyways, it turns out when they were adding my two extra courses, one of them never actually got added. In other words, I was doing all the work for a course I wasn't even registered in. And without that course, I didn't qualify for my program. They kicked me out and that was that.

Good thing I caught it in time. More phone calls later and things are all good. But seriously, it's ridiculous how many problems have been caused all because I wasn't able to get into that Internship program back in 2010.

Enough is enough.

But there is a silver lining to all of this. Due to me having to recreate my schedule, I now now have a 5 day weekend. That's right, a combination of late afternoon/evening courses on Tuesday, Wednesday and Thursday gives me a very nice schedule.

And I prefer to be able to sleep in, take courses at night. Everything worked out in my favor. So there's that.

The building that Theresa will be taking classes in has a kitchen. Maybe I can drop down one day and cook her lunch.

Or burn the building down.

The Unhelpful Teaching Assistant

I'm not sure what it's like in other Universities but here, the teaching assistants, or TA's, don't really do all the much. We'll only see them at exam viewings or proctoring exams. They never really help with the teaching of the course.

And that's fine. If that's how the University wants to pay its Grad students so be it. Who am I to judge?

But when you have a TA that is extremely unhelpful to the point where it looks like she's trying to make your course unnecessarily difficult, that's just wrong.

Why are you doing this to us?

It seems like such a long time ago. Last week when I had all those papers due. Some of you might actually think that I dislike papers, that's not the case. I generally enjoy writing, I mean, I do own a blog right? Writing papers comes naturally to me, or maybe I've just had really good training.

So for my Developmental Psychology course, we were given the option of making a Developmental Psychology video or writing a research paper. Given my past ease with paper writing obviously I went with the paper. I don't want to act and talk to a camera for all my classmates to see.

Within a week, I wish I had done the video project.

And a large part of it was due to the TA. I don't think she really knew what she was doing or what she wanted from us. For example, she wanted us to review some stuff, write a paper on it and submit. Most of us assumed it was going to be like the paper our prof assigned us earlier so we wrote in a fairly informal style.

And we all lost marks on it. They was no indication that the TA wanted something written in APA format (basically, scientific Psychology paper style), no rubric whatsoever. And actually the same thing happened with the final paper. No concrete indication of what she expected or wanted. I can assure you, it is quite difficult to write a paper when you don't know what exactly is expected of you.

JUST TELL US WHAT YOU WANT.

Ok, I know some of you are saying, "Damian, so why didn't you just go and talk to her". Fine, completely reasonable IF she was ever available. Twice, I went to see her at her office during her scheduled hours. Twice she wasn't there. Turns out, her hours were wrong. And she didn't bother to inform us until the term was NEARLY OVER.

She also gave us a phone number to call (she never responded to any of the voice messages I left her), and an email address (that she never replied to) BUT eventually I got my meeting with her.

Because I ran into her in a hallway. And we had an impromptu meeting right there.

Seriously.

I could make a second post about all the crap this woman didn't help us with. There's a lot, I've barely scratched the surface. A vague, confusing project that probably required more work than necessary and supervisor that was unhelpful and largely unavailable. I mean, during the week that this paper was due, she sent us an email in advance telling us she would have no office hours. At all. I didn't even bother emailing her for help, she probably wouldn't have responded.

Luckily, several of us have come forth to the prof who was surprised and concerned. For our troubles this paper will be marked much easier and the TA will be getting "constructive criticism" in May.

And I'm glad, I have never spent so much time writing something and felt so insecure about it.

Midterm Post #2

I'm finally nearing the end of my midterms, it's been a long and fairly uncomfortable week but I'm getting by. I'm certain the rest of you are having a better time than me, if not, feel free to trade. Who else wants to learn about memory techniques and infant development theories.

Both my midterms can be condensed to this.

Japan is home to a lot of neat stuff. I was there once but didn't see this unfortunately:

One day, this will be my Halloween costume:

And lately I've been playing A LOT of Starcraft 2. I think Asians are just naturally drawn to this game. My last video will only appeal to fellow players who enjoy commentaries. When Cheese Fails is easily some of the dumbest (and funniest stuff) I've seen in a long time:

And that's all for now, I'll have a normal post by Sunday.

Hopefully.

Midterm Post #1

It's midterm week. Yep. Tons of exams and stuff to do. As usual, I'm just going to dump a ton of videos and then head back to studying.

Hard at work.

First video shows exactly why I want a corgi. They seem to have a tendency to do things like this:

Portal 2 has been out for about a year now but some of the promotional videos still make me laugh. And this one is relevant to current holidays:

Lots of talk of The Hobbit movie coming out. And the first thing that came to my mind was this video:

And now if you'll excuse me, I have a ton of Psychology to be reviewing.

I Messed up Again

Who remembers my horrific scheduling mishap a few months ago? Nobody? Thank goodness. Because maybe now my second and even more horrific and stupid scheduling mishap will not look as bad.

And when I say bad, I mean, I screwed up my degree bad.

What am I even doing?

So to reiterate, I'm in the Psychology Specialization program. Unique to this Specialization is an Internship program which I'm also trying to get into. However, I exceeded the course limit for the Internship, so to compensate, I try to reapply and reduce the number of courses I'm currently taking per term so I don't exceed the course limit as much. Hopefully to increase my chances of getting the internship because they tell me the number of exceptions they make are quite high.

What I forgot though was that the Specialization Program had a minimum course requirement per term.

And I no longer met it.

I didn't have the requirements for my degree.

Out you go.

Let's be honest here. I'm kind of screwed. Everything I've worked for has been for naught. I've already missed the deadline for graduating, the deadline for adding courses was way back in January. The best I can hope for is graduating with a Major in Psychology in the Fall and scramble to find a minor in something else. The internship is like some distant dream at this point.


Unless.


Unless I wanted to do something that most people would consider crazy.

This will be be fun...

The coordinator gave me the following option:

• Talk to professors who you've worked with in the past. 
• See if you can take on a second research course with one.
• Join the class of another one.

The coordinator was willing to pull a few strings for me and make an exception again if the profs were willing to.

Note this would be in addition to everything I'm taking right now. Midterms are in less than 2 weeks, I have to start studying for my current 2 courses and prepare to launch an experiment for one lab. On top of this I'd have to catch up on everything taught in a new course and start running an experiment in the other lab.

So what did I do?

Of course I took her up on the offer. What choice did I have?

 

Basically.

This is do or die. I have invested too much time and effort into trying to get this internship to fail now let alone my degree. Employers want people who have actual work experience, if I want to have a chance at a job when I graduate, I need this internship. And to even have a chance to get the internship, I need to remain in the Specialization program.

I will succeed in taking on all of these courses or kill myself trying.

And it's going to take a lot more than a bloody course limit to stop me.

New Year, New Term

I head back to class tomorrow. Really not looking forward to it. I didn't get to spend that much time with my girlfriend Theresa due to conflicting work shifts and other scheduling issues. My backlog of computer games is still massive and I don't like the idea of being unable to sleep in anymore.

This dog has no idea how lucky he is.

And how did I fare last term? Kind of odd actually. I found my Abnormal Psychology course to be interesting, the exams were picky but easy. My Developmental Psychology course I found was stupid and I messed up a lot of the earlier assignments due to careless errors.

So imagine my surprise when I did quite well in Developmental and completely screwed up Abnormal.

I don't even know what to say.

So this term I'm taking a course in Memory, another Developmental Psychology course, and more research. I'm really struggling with research as nothing I'm doing is working at the moment. The next stage of our experiment has been delayed for way too long but nothing I do seems to be working.

In the meantime I still need to send an appeal for that internship. Why is this internship so important to me? Several reasons. I want to get into grad school but thanks to a disastrous third year I'm not going anywhere fast.

There are two options for me: First would be to graduate and then do a 5th year to hopefully compensate for the third. This, isn't so great. I'm kind of tired of classes, losing money to tuition and studying for exams.

The second would be the internship. Work for a year, get money, experience, etc.. More importantly, there have been people in the past with much worse GPAs than me who got into grad school after they completed their respective internships. Coincidence? I think not.

Or it might be time for me to take off my tin foil hat.

Wish me luck, I don't think many people have read my first post and why I started this blog. But I think I know what I want to do now.

And getting this internship will make it that much easier for me.

Finals Week Post 2

Ok, this is coming a bit late. Posting is kind of odd for some reason so I'm doing this live. I'M DOING IT LIVE LIKE BILL O'REILLY.

I really need to get back to studying Developmental Psychology.

So to start today's videos, Yorkies are trained killers:

Derpiest assassins ever.

And now something for the sports fans:

Such grace.

And this last video is long. This is easily the longest video I've ever shared and I doubt I'll ever share anything this long again. It explains what SOPA and PIPA are and if you aren't informed I beg you to watch it because it affects you no matter where in the world you live.

It pertains to internet censorship in the most insane proportions. If either of those acts pass it would give giant companies the ability to shut down any site they want if they feel like it. An example would be if a user on a site such a Youtube has a video they don't like, all of Youtube can be shut off immediately. Or if a blog on Blogger has a picture they don't like all of Blogger is now offline.

This isn't crazy, things like this have already happened but with other sites such as Megaupload. And it will only get worse unless people stop these insane bills that Congress is pushing for. The guy in this video explains things in greater depth than I can though so listen to him.

EA supports SOPA, another reason to hate EA.

I'm Canadian, I can't do anything about this. But I like my internet freedom as much as the next guy. To all my American followers, I ask that you help the rest of us out, and help to stop either of these insane things from going through.

I'll see you guys Wednesday.

Finals Week Post 1

Finals are consuming all my time meaning I haven't been able to visit as many blogs as I'd like OR make quality posts. Which means it's time for more Youtube videos. Yay! Don't worry, I try and keep these videos around a minute to 2 minutes, I know you're all busy and who watches 10 minute long videos anyways?

Exception are made for Bersercules however...

Animals are always popular so let's start with one of those:

Adorable.

And now something painful:

You can hear it...

Is this child abuse or animal abuse? I can't tell:

Let's see how many Soviet Russia jokes I get in the comments...

Who's still with me? This last video is only NSFW is you have a dirty mind. Do you have a dirty mind? I know I do:

Is there anything he can't do?

That's it for now. I think I have this post set to publish on Monday meaning I'm writing my Abnormal Psychology midterm soon. Wish me luck, and I'll see you guys on Thursday.

Midterm Week Post 3

Yep. Here's another automated post. Developmental psychology may be done but that still leaves us with Abnormal psychology to study for.

And by study I mean listen.

As usual, I'm dumping Youtube videos for you guys to watch. If you have preferences let me know or if you want something else. I haven't made a post for Wednesday yet so I'm still flexible in what I can do.

Cats have been known to boost page views...

Insert obligatory Episode 3 comment here.

And instead of 4 videos today, let's have 3 and add the extra time to the last one. I'm not sure what to classify it under but I think D4 would be a better person to ask.

I never get tired of watching this.

Back to studying for me. I still have a few hours of audio to listen to and several dozen powerpoint slides to review.

Don't worry, after these midterms are done you can hear all about my life again, such as the brownies I tried to make or what the doctor has told me.

I suck at Scheduling

Due to my inability to find a job I figured I might as well enter a fourth year of University and graduate with a degree. I think I know what I'm doing, I mean I've signed up for classes for 3 years already, how hard can a 4th be? But just to be safe, I go to talk to a co-coordinator.

She takes one look at my Fall term, and her eyes just widen.

"Uh Damian, we got a problem here".

Crap.

Turns out I've already hit my cap for the number of Junior/100 level courses I can take. In other words, the course in Java and Economics that I was taking wasn't doing anything towards my degree. I was paying for deadweight courses.

Luckily, I managed to work some things out and I've dropped both courses. I'm hoping that I have enough credits for graduation and if not, the Winter term will fix that. This leaves me with a ton of psychology courses. Research psychology is research, there's not much to say about it. I enjoy it.

The other courses, I am having issues with.

For starters, my Abnormal psychology class while interesting has a DVD lecture available for purchase. The prof strongly suggested that we buy and use it. A quick listen reveals that it's basically 4 DVDs that cost $100 for the exact same lectures we hear in class.

I'm serious, the things are word for word, I'm guessing he hasn't changed his lectures in a while because I hear that this guy has been doing this for a number of years. We also think he has several DVDs that he rotates through because the DVDs from just last year are somehow obsolete.

As if I wasn't poor enough already.

And then Developmental Psych is uh... different. Lectures consist of her standing in from of a classroom asking the class for their opinions of various concepts or groups of people gathered together to "discuss" a random concept. Half the class doesn't show up anymore and I sit around, vaguely paying attention.

Or catch up on some much needed rest.

Round #2 of midterms are soon so hopefully I do well on those. Maybe I should start studying now...

Registering for fall courses

Wow, the comments I've been getting have been so supportive and helpful. The internet is supposed to be filled with rude individuals and yet, here you guys are, defying the norm. (With the exception of a few spambots). Thank you to everyone who has commented, I don't mind if they're long I still read them, don't worry. Good luck to the fellow job hunters, we need it.

<3 you guys.

But, I have to face to possibility of not being able to find a job. Which means I'll be heading back to classes in the fall and I should probably finish registering for my courses as soon as possible.

Part of the problem is that I'm running out of courses to take. Or rather, courses that still interest me and are still open. I'm mostly interested in Psychology so I'm taking a course in Research, Abnormal and maybe Developmental or Cultural Psychology. I'm also taking a Computing Science class with a friend and I'm considering retaking that Organic Chemistry course I dropped. Still got one spot open and I'm considering filling it with a course in Economics.

Look at me! Trying to be all smart and educated and stuff.

And now the problems that have arisen.

First, I can't seem to register for any of the Developmental Psychology courses. I'm not sure if it's because I've reached the limit of how many I can take or maybe my limit on Psychology courses because I don't think any Developmental Psych classes are "restricted" or "special" courses. Especially when my other Science major friends have been able to take it. It also wouldn't explain why I was able to sign up for Abnormal Psychology. The Cultural psych and Economics course is also full so I'll be watching them like a hawk for an opening.

There is an opening for the Organic Chemistry course BUT it's with the shitty prof. Obviously the good prof is taken by this point. Honestly though, I'm not too excited at the prospect of retaking that class, there was a reason why I dropped it. (I'm really stupid at chemistry).

Hurr durr atoms and molecules.

I could take other things I guess? Except I've taken a lot of sciences already, not too keen on taking more Sociology or Philosophy. My friend was also complaining about the Math and Physics department screwing up his schedule, not allowing him to sign up for open classes either. Maybe the Psychology department is having similar problems?

I'll take a look at it later. I've already paid the fee that confirms that I'll be attending the University in the fall. But if I manage to get either of those jobs I'll cancel all my courses and go work for a year.

And I would be more than happy with that. I won't have any of these stupid scheduling problems and issues.