Time is Flying...

This week was very busy and flew by at like rocket speed, between time spent on assignments and just keeping busy. I attended 2 more GLP (Global Leadership Program) workshops (colloquia, as they call them). I feel like they have fancy words here sometimes, like instead of “mandatory” things, they are “compulsory” things. I also learned this week that “can we have an early mark?” means “can we get dismissed early?” Anyway the first workshop I attended this week titled “picture worth 1000 words” I was falling asleep in towards the end and it was only mid afternoon, but I guess it didn’t help that I was also quite hungry as well.

            On Tuesday, I attended another GLP workshop titled “Effective Writing.” Seeing as I have started to write a lot in the past 3 years, mostly journaling, I was quite interested in this workshop and it is honestly the first one that I could have lasted another hour or so listening to the woman who presented. She did an amazing job and I really enjoyed it and stayed awake through the whole thing and this one was from 6-9pm, so the fact that I was wide awake at the end still was impressive (at least to me). We got to work in groups a lot and talk with a bunch of people, getting to know a bit about them and learned about effective writing. Well we learned some about effective writing anyway. We talked a lot about language and how it changes over time and how it plays a role in leadership in our future, such as where we might work. It definitely helps when we talk to others, because otherwise the workshop turns into listening to a 3 hr lecture, which is not so fun. I also learned something interesting about the campus in this workshop. So the buildings on campus are named with letters and numbers, such as W5C, C4A or E7B, etc. When I first arrived at the campus and saw these names for the buildings I was totally confused as to why they didn’t just give them all names like the UB campus with Badly and Cooke or whatever. There were just too many letters and numbers to look at, at first. So I wondered why these buildings started with certain letters, because it was clear that they didn’t use all the letters in the alphabet. Well ‘W’ stands for West, because it’s the west side of campus and ‘E’ stands for East and ‘C’ stands for central. It all makes sense now, except for the building X5B and Y3A off in the distance, but most of the campus makes sense.

            Wednesday I set my alarm for 6am so that I could go swimming in the morning. First let me say that I don’t have class until 1pm on Wednesday and here I was setting my alarm for 6am…yes I’m a bit crazy, but I love starting my day early in the morning. The annoying thing was that breakfast doesn’t start until 7, so I just had a granola bar and headed to the pool and ate breakfast when I returned. By starting my day early and swimming before 8am, I was able to head to the new library and get some work done in the morning. I absolutely love the new library which just opened for studying this week. There is more space than the old library to plug in laptops which is very handy, however it still fills up quickly, so I make sure to get there early.

new library!!

wonderful study spaces

            That night, I went to zumba, which is always fun and a great way to spend my time after dinner. So I definitely got my exercise for the day between swimming and zumba and walking around campus.

            Thursday I finally got some of my break plans set, paying for my flights and trip to Cairns to snorkel at the Great Barrier Reef before heading to my fun science tutorial. In my tutorial I got the job of weighting soil then baking it in the oven and weighting it again. I was given this job as my tutor thinks that I’m the most responsible in the class and being the math major, I guess that means I can read scales correctly and not mix up soils. Apparently the major problem in the previous tutorials was that people would forget which soil was which when they had to weight them a second time. This was a very important tutorial as it will be used for our next assignment (which I have do over break). Supposedly if you include the soil weight data and some error analysis about it, you can get a higher grade. I’m totally aiming for that as it’s just a few simple math calculations!

Before I knew it, it was Friday. Other than class, I booked the bridge climb for over break. I’m very excited for next week when break begins!!