Busy week

This week has been pretty crazy so far, and I still have an exam and two labs to finish it off! We’ve started Physical labs (three a week), our midterms are upon us (first one was Tuesday, next Friday and so on) and the tutorials are getting more complicated by the minute; as well as our regular lectures… in which “revision lectures” for the summer exams have already been mentioned. I’m almost wishing to go back to the beginning of term and start over, it seems bizzarre that there’s only three weeks of term left!

However, as a fellow Chemistry student said to me yesterday “At least we’re getting our monies worth.”

Which is very true, however much I complain about the work load, (especially as the rest of my housemates are all doing BA’s or MA’s) I’d be complaining more about having less contact hours in our timetable, even if it is x3 the amount of most “art’s” students.

The most exciting part of my week so far has been attempting my physical lab report and using ORIGIN for the first time to plot graphs. I honestly don’t understand why they teach you how to use Excel the first year of University (obviously as a recap as you learn in secondary school usually as well) when studying a science degree, then turn around and inform you how unhelpful it is in second year (like we hadn’t noticed!) and how it would be even less helpful in third year when doing your final year project. We have been informed that we should use ORIGIN or PRISM: which are so much easier to use!

At first I was very sceptic of this statement as I’m the sort of person that using any sort of computer programme apart from Word is a struggle, as the only thing I’m good at it typing. I was surprised and relieved to find that it was actually true, and definitely saves time plotting graphs and extracting values/data from the graphs – especially as it calculates the errors for all the values for you; which is really important for physical labs. They love errors!