Playing Catch-Up

Don't worry, I am alive! A week for me without writing a post on this blog is pretty huge, I know and am fully aware of my slacking in the blogging department. In my defense, life sucked last week due to assignments and midterms. I learned that one only has to have one assignment and one midterm to have life become horrible. It's dealing with all of the other people in your life who have multiple assignments and multiple midterms that complicates everything.

The number one thing about the semester that I detest is that 2 out of my 3 courses involves group work and there is not a single student I know in the entire world who likes doing group work. Even if you have the most reliable and intelligent people to work with, group work sucks. The hardest part of it all is coordinating schedules so that you can meet with your group members to discuss what's going on and who's doing what and all that crap it entails. Coordinating schedules and planning meetings and sending email after email after email to make sure that you're doing what you should, and does this person like what you wrote here and is this a good way to approach this topic...blah blah blah...I'm getting nauseous just thinking of it. Plus, in both of the courses we have to do assessments on our group members which is just horrible. The hard part is that a lot of the times you're working with your friends and trying have an objective point of view when giving them a mark on what they deserve is so hard!

I hate group work and I think it's unfair for professors to make us do it. I'm a verifiable control-freak which makes it even worse because it's difficult for me to give the power to someone else to do work which will have my name on it as well. It sucks when someone doesn't pull their own weight and their name is on the list for the group and they receive a good mark since the mark represents everyone involved. Or, on the flip side, you receive a bad mark because someone didn't pull their own weight or handed in something which is below your standards. It just sucks all around and I wish there was a way I could ban group work from the university world. Any suggestions on how to make this idea fly?

In the words of Three Days Grace, "Let's start a Riot! A Riot! Let's start a Riot!"

The thing that made this week so difficult for me is that our group in one of my classes had a large assignment due on Friday and the part I volunteered to do was much much larger than I had anticipated and by the time I realized just how huge it was, everyone else was done their parts and had moved onto other class assignments and/or studying for midterms. When they realized just how huge my part was and began asking if I needed help, it had gotten to the point in which I had already done so much that it was near impossible to give the work load to someone else since I knew where my train of thought was and I knew how difficult it would be for someone to step in and pick up where I left off. In short, I had to suck it up and finish the stupid thing. My head nearly exploded a couple of times but I got it done. Unfortunately I completed it with only a day to spare and I had a midterm the next day.

I haven't felt so terrible after writing a test since Biochemistry. That is a bad, bad, bad sign.

On a good note however, I got an interview for the graduate internship program at Capital Health in Halifax! On a bad note, it's a day long workshop in which they set up all of these skill tests and activities to test your capabilities and to demonstrate how brilliant you are. Frankly, I am terrified. No denying it. I am really good at buckling under the pressure for these kinds of things. There's also the large fee it will cost to travel over there, spend the night, stay the day and drive home. Why does money have to rule the world? Sure it's easy to handle when you have lots to spare. Damn starving student status is ruining my life.

On another good note, I am successfully slacking the past couple of days and spent nearly 3 hours in Starbucks catching up with Sam. We've spent zero time together since I moved out of the house back in November and I loved loved loved spending the morning with her today. We're so polar opposite in so many ways which I love. Hopefully she feels that same way as I do. I've missed her.