Erik

Been a very busy time recently, all new lecturers in my classes came out of the gates fast, and in order to keep up and review the stuff since before break, keep up with assignments and lab reports has been a lot of work. I even had three assignments all due tomorrow, which means I’ve been working hard for almost the past week. The weekend was supposed to be a bit of a reprieve because I only left one assignment to do, but it turns out that the new lecturer has a very different understanding of how much work an assignment should entail then I do. While the assignment was only three questions, it was almost two days of work, although I can’t say I spent all of my time on it. 

The pressure of the assignments has gotten a little more intense recently because I’ve been getting a lot of assignments and reports back, and I keep getting A+’s on them, which makes me not want to fall off my current streak of 6 in a row with a bad performance! The assignments haven’t been easy either, as the class average is, on average, 20 points lower then my score…

If anyone is interested in what that last physics assignment looks like right now, though it might get tweaked a bit before I send it in I’ve attached the PDF file. (I do all my assignments on the computer to practice the formatting code, which I’m happy to say I’m getting a lot better with.) I should warn that it is a lot of really intimidating looking mathematics… p250a4

This was a fairly uneventful day compared to the rest of the journey. We had to get up early to make the shuttle, and had a few minutes of panic when we couldn’t find the key to our room to return. Turns out it was in fact in the most likely place, under the sofa cushions. The bus schedule worked out so as to allow us to spend a few hours in the city of Thames before making the final leg of our trip back to Auckland, so we took advantage of that. Unfortunately for us, we didn’t count on everything in Thames being closed on Tuesday. We checked out 3 different museums and an art gallery, all of them had something to the effect of, open Thursday-Sunday, or Wed-Monday, but all of them were closed on Tuesday and I have no idea why, but it meant that we ended up spend some time chilling in a café instead of exploring the finer points of the city. 

When we eventually made it back to the dorm I was pretty glad to be back, I was pretty tired overall after the 8 days, and I had a good deal of homework that had to be done that I was glad to finally get a start on. But of course, as is fitting, the dinner the night we got back was really really bad. The food gets worse when the number of people dropped and I think that might have been the low point of the whole vacation, because there was no selection at all, very disappointing. (Though on a happier note there is now a new chef and the food for the past few days has been significantly better then normal).