Foreign Perspectives

Signals & Perception was a really interesting course but, for me, it wasn’t as satisfying as it might have been as I ended up having to slot it in between a whole lot of other stuff which made it feel like a number of separate courses as it was very much a stop-go experience for me courtesy of me ending up with a little too many separate courses during the year.

It wasn’t meant to be that way but starting a new job in April was something that I’d not allowed for and in particular I’d not allowed for it roughly equating to another 60 point course. Net effect was that April to October was a bit of a nightmare time-wise for everything (not counting real life either!). Thankfully, the exam yesterday marks the end of that period and I notionally have a week off before the next course starts and it’s only a 20 pointer too.

Although an overly busy time, it’s been a really interesting roller-coaster of a year. Last October saw me starting S205, the main chemistry course, with a short autism course (SK124) kicking in a month later. SD329 weighed in in February and was going fine ’til the job offer came through in March. Early June disappeared in preparation for the S205 exam and the second half of June went with the pre-course assignments for the biology (SXR376) and chemistry (SXR344) summer schools which took place in the first couple of weeks of July. Coming back from them, it was straight into the assignment for SD329 before spending most of August on the assignments for the summer schools. In September it was catch-up with SD329 and then the final assignment for it before diving into revision for the exam. Not a recommended approach but, passes permitting, it means that I’m over the hump of the degree and have only two 30 point courses and a 10 pointer to complete it by 2014.

I was a bit brain-dead last night but managed to have a first proper look at what’s coming up in the Metals & Life (S347) course. First glance, it appeared like a lot of reading but it’s about 60 pages over three weeks, not the one week that I’d thought initially. Also, it seems to be run like a biology course which dives into some chemistry along the way so, hopefully, not too bad. I’m not overly keen on having the exam at the end of April though as that’ll be a couple of months into S377 which has a bit of a reputation of being very difficult.

Not to be forgotten is some preparatory reading for S377 which needs done between now and Christmas. That’s around 250 pages from S204 which we didn’t need to cover during S204 itself but which is required reading for S377.

I thought that the SD329 exam wasn’t too bad. With interdisciplinary courses, there’s what appears to be a totally frightening amount of information of differing types to go over and starting the revision is scary. Once I got well into it, things seemed to come together though and I ended up with 5 or 6 quite good answers out of the 8 short questions and only one pretty poor one. For the longer questions I think I’ve two fairly good ones and one reasonable out of the three. More than enough to pass I think but the overall result could be anywhere from 50 to 70 as I was dreadful at estimating my assignment marks during the course.