Guide on How To University

When you're in high school, your teachers will be very clear on one thing: if you don't have your future planned from the moment you pick your subjects at the beginning of your last year of high school, you may as well kiss your bright future goodbye. For some reason, it seems to be every school teacher's life's mission to convince you of the fact that your life's destiny will be determined for you based on the decisions you make from the age of 16 onward.

I don't know about you, but at the age of 16, I could barely decide what I wanted to eat, (I have since figured it out -- it's probably pizza) let alone what I wanted to do for the rest of my life. Thankfully, I have a family member who spent 30 years of his life doing one thing and then abruptly decided to do pretty much exactly the opposite, so I never whole-heartedly believed in this whole myth. But for those who did prescribe to the belief that the choice of their high school subjects which would lead to a narrowed field of university courses to choose from which would then lead further into a career they would be stuck in for the rest of their lives these decisions must have been truly terrifying.

Me? I have made a number of choices during the course of my university life, all of which have honestly reminded me of the fact that I am terrible at making decisions. Since my life's story makes therefore for great comedy, hell, it'd be a crime of me not to share! So here, have a timeline, starting from my last three years of high school.

How Silbena ended up where she is now

Third last year of high school
Silbena decides on a hodgepodge of subjects for the last two years of high school based on previous experience, picking subjects she likes and has previously been good at. She has no clue about what she wants to do with her life.

Second last year of high school
Silbena drops legal studies because fuck that noise.

An accurate depiction of Silbena's feelings toward legal studies

Third last year of high school
Beginning of the year - Silbena is absolutely convinced that she is going to become a Creative Person when she grows up. She is debating university courses like journalism and creative writing.

I imagine this is what creativity looks like

Halfway through the year - Silbena has an epiphany and decides to study science instead.

I imagine this is what epiphanies look like

Before final exams - After looking into several universities, Silbena decides on Monash University due to the freedom they give to their students to choose their own units without a prescribed core structure of a course. She is so adamant on being accepted to this university she does not even enter other universities into her preferences.

On release of results - Silbena finds out she has done much better than anticipated and hastily changes her mind to do a double degree in science and biomedical sciences, because she feels like she would be "wasting" her good grades otherwise.

First year of university
Beginning of the year - Silbena enrols in her double degree, gleeful and excited. She also gleefully falls into the trap of spending way too much money on textbooks she basically doesn't need anyway. She never buys textbooks again.

Don't buy the textbook until your lecturer starts assigning practice problems from it, and even then wait to see whether you get inundated in mandatory assignments first

Halfway through first semester - Silbena suddenly remembers that the last time she did biology was in year 9 AND she never liked it then either. Why the hell did she choose to do biomedical sciences again?

Nope, biology didn't get any more enjoyable in the time you didn't do it

End of first semester - Silbena switches courses faster than she can switch pants and drops the hell out of biomedical sciences to study simply science instead. She gets excited because now she can actually choose some electives for second semester that she wouldn't have had time for in her double degree. She chooses philosophy, because hey, thinking is fun?

Halfway through second semester - Silbena finds out that philosophy is the worst thing on the planet and begins to suspect that she really shouldn't be allowed to make her own life choices.

End of second semester - Due to her excellent grades, Silbena receives a letter from the science faculty asking her to enrol in a course that will allow her to do honours at the end of her course. Silbena switches courses for a second time.

Second year of university

First semester - Silbena can't take any electives. She is debating on whether she should major in chemistry or in geology. She really likes environmental chemistry and the idea of combining geology and chemistry, which could be done in environmental sciences. She begins to wonder about future careers.

Second semester - Silbena is sick of drawing rocks and gives up on geology, deciding to major in chemistry instead. She is still fascinated by environmental chemistry. She is adamant that she is much better at analytical than synthetic chemistry and is likely to end up in that sort of a field.

Third year of university

First semester - Silbena finds out that environmental chemistry is the worst thing on the planet and decides to focus her energies on synthetic chemistry instead.

And in the second semester -- who knows? There is still plenty of time for me to decide that this whole education thing isn't for me at all, drop out and do knitting for a living instead. I think the moral of the story here is that I'm really great at making decisions: but it's just that when I make decisions, they usually end up being wrong.

Don't stress, pumpkins. We'll find out what we want to do in the end, and we'll just do a whole bunch of terribly boring things in the meanwhile just so we can cross those things off. 

Book review: The Rithmatist

Remember that one time I tried to review Patrick Rothfuss' The Name of the Wind and The Wise Man's Fear? Yeah, me neither. Honestly, I'm probably trying to block the memory because I didn't do such a good job of it. But you live and you learn. What's more, a book I picked up from Minotaur (the best place in the world) last week has awakened such thoughts and feelings inside of me that I feel the need to try to organise them and share them with the internet.

The book I picked up is called The Rithmatist, by Brandon Sanderson. As you, being a smart, beautiful individual, have probably figured out, the cover is displayed on the right (EDTA: I'm definitely not a smart and beautiful individual since I can't even figure out left from right). As you smart, beautiful individual have probably also figured out, it's a steampunk novel. For those of you out of the loop: if it's got a cover framed by a whole bunch of shiny (and I will publicly vouch for its shininess), golden gears depicting a kid running in a trench coat with what looks like a cathedral in the background, yeah, it's probably steampunk. Another telling sign of steampunk novels is an orange-brown colour scheme -- but really, mostly it's the gears.

I will grant the fact that the book isn't really steampunk in that the technology of the world isn't driven by steam but rather by mechanical energy. However, the world is instantly recognisable for any fan of the blanket steampunk genre.

Apart from being steampunk, the novel is also categorised as young adult literature, as far as I can work out. That's what it says on the author's website, anyway.

The Rithmatist is set in an alternate universe that is somewhat recognisable from a modern point of view in terms of geography, religion and historical figures. Apart from its reliance on mechanical power, a major factor setting the world of The Rithmatist apart from the modern world is the existence of a form of magic called -- you guessed it -- rithmatics. Rithmatics are based on principles of geometry and mathematics, where a rithmatist's ability to draw basic shapes and creatures called "chalklings" on the ground determines their power in this magic -- which is essentially the power to make one's drawings come to life. What I approve of in this magic is that it is clearly constrained with "known rithmatic lines" -- in essence, rithmatic drawings are a little like our good old run-of-the-mill magic spells: you might do them a little differently to the next magician, but they will always produce the same effect. That's a good way of keeping the form magic from getting vague or simply convenient. Of course, the main character will set on a task to bend the magic's rules, as is inevitable, but we will get to that.

I'll note that rithmatics is spelled with a capital R in the novel. I resent that. I don't spell magic with a capital M, physics with a capital P or mathematics with a capital M. I'm not going to spell your fictional discipline with a capital letter, either. I suspect it has something to do with the discipline being tied to the religion of the book somehow -- but since this is never elaborated on, I honestly don't really care.

So sue me

Different to most fantasy novels, the main character, Joel, isn't a progidy in rithmatics. Except that he is. This is to say that he hasn't been chosen by "the Master" (who is clearly a religious figure but whose identity and function never become fully clear, frustratingly enough) to have rithmatic abilities. However, despite this unfortunate fact that he doesn't have the magic, he is an absolute savant in the field. He attends Armedius, which is a school for both rithmatics and for the extremely rich. However, since he is the relatable hero of this story, he is neither of these things and has instead had the opportunity to attend because of a favour the principal owed to his late father. As a short and sweet description, Joel is perfect. The only reason he is not kicking your ass right now is that he is held back by his circumstances -- his passion and aptitude for rithmatic drawings is overridden by the fact that he wasn't chosen by the Master. He is "overlooked" by many because he does not have the wealth to be important or to reach for what he may want in life. I say overlooked in quotation marks because over the course of the book, Joel is in numerous conversations with professors and even the principal of Armedius where he is treated as an equal, or perhaps even more than one. This is despite the fact that he is a teenager, has only studied rithmatics second-hand, and is an unbearable little prick.

Though perhaps he's only an unbearable little prick because he doesn't have any real flaws. He is a hero from day 1 -- it's as if the whole book is just going through the motions of getting him there.

And what a drag getting him there is! The writing style is simplistic, with a matter-of-fact fashion of going through situations. Now, although I have never been a huge fan of this writing style, there are absolute masters of this style, such as Feist, who can use it simply to heighten the tension of their story. In contrast, The Rithmatist is absolutely flat with no atmosphere at all. Granted, the style does begin paying off in a bunch of more high-action scenes toward the end of the book, although I don't think the payoff is equal to the effort of slogging through  200 pages of Joel going "but what if" and "but something seems off and NOBODY WILL LISTEN TO MEEEEE until it's too late and then I'll have to save the day!"

Then, of course, there's Melody. She is the hero's sidekick and the most excruciating female stereotype I have encountered in any book that I have read in a long time. She is described as overly dramatic, prone to moodswings, completely ruled by emotion and devoid of any reason. At first, Joel finds her unspeakably irritating, but warms up to her sooner or later -- the turning point occurs when Joel notes that when Melody isn't being crazy, she can "really look quite pretty." Despite the entire book being centred around a mystery that Melody and Joel are solving together, I think she only has one original thought in the entirety of the novel -- and that is only because she had undergone an experience that Joel had not. Further, Melody is a rithmatist, but don't get excited yet, because she's absolutely terrible at it. Terrible, that is, except for the part where she can draw unicorns and with her woman's intuition, without having to do the careful calculations and geometric drawings that all other rithmatists do (you know, the ones Joel is great at), and literally talks them into doing things for her. As a science major, I find this polarisation of abilities between Joel and Melody into Reason and Emotion extremely belittling and disturbing, and even more so because by the end of the book, Joel is essentially using Melody as a tool to do the rithmatics that he himself does not have the aptitude to perform. Sure, it comes across as cooperation, because "hey Melody is good at one thing stop looking at me like that." She is never the one calling the shots, even though she is the one with the magic power. She exists solely for his benefit.

In summary, I am disappointed. The concept of the novel is fascinating, and some of the world seems to be very interesting -- but even this is poorly developed and shrouded in feeble mystery to keep the reader engaged. The atmosphere of the novel is nonexistent. The characters are flat and offensively polarised into gender stereotypes on subjects that are relevant to the modern world (logic, mathematics) and where women -- young girls -- desperately need positive role models.

In short, the whole book lacked dimension -- which is kind of ironic, if you stop to think about it. Good job at creating a two-dimensional story about people creating two-dimensional beings, Sanderson.

Chemistry feelings on a graph

You may have noticed that I haven't been on this blog for a while. You can have three guesses for why, but only if all of them amount to "third year chemistry."

Ah, third year chemistry. I could write odes to you. But then again, I could stab you in the eye. I could take you on a nice picnic! But I could also poison your drink when you're not looking.

Suffice to say, I have conflicted feelings about chemistry. Since it now takes up a majority of my time and brainspace, perhaps it isn't so strange that my feelings about chemistry are largely dependent on what time of day it is. To best illustrate this progress of feeling over the course of an average day, I have helpfully constructed a graph. But before I let you see it, I'd like to give you some background so that you can best understand this graph:

1) I'm doing a research project in chemistry this semester in place of a more academic unit. It involves doing real research work under a supervisor.

2) This research project, intended to replace a single unit out of the four we do per semester, probably takes up about the same amount of time as all of the other three combined. My day is therefore generally centred around being in the lab.

3) The project I'm doing involves slow reactions that are left alone for about 3 days before I can even check whether they've worked or not.

4) Out of 10 reactions I've put on to date, I've had two successes and eight failures. Ergo, failure is common.

5) Research work is never done. Whenever you think that you're done for the day, something else will come up.

And now you're caught up. Enjoy the graph.

Paint 2: Revenge of the Paint

As all those of you who follow me on Twitter (@Silbena, for those who don't know,  extremely surprisingly) will know that last Sunday,  I got my paws on a new phone. I've replaced my ages-old, much-loved-and-hated iPhone 4 with a Samsung Galaxy Note II. The most prevalent and important features of this phone,  as far as I have discovered,  are 1) it has a fantastic inbuilt stylus and 2) it's probably bigger than your face.

As followers of this blog know,  I have this weird obsession with creating or editing pictures with Paint. 

These people may also begin to guess at the sort of childish delight the possession of a piece of hardware which can turn my freehand scribblings into a paint-like format would produce in me. A whole new realm of possibilities has been opened to me! Wherever inspiration strikes,  I can turn my most obscure of ideas into a hastily scribbled format! Oh,  the joy!

With this preamble,  I would like to present the first work of art I have produced with this wondrous device. I call this one "Air Conditioning." Lo and behold!

Confused? Here, let me give you a hint: Pavlov's dog.

Birth of social lives disguised as death

Stop me if you've heard any of these before:

• "We're more connected now than we've ever been, and yet drifting ever further apart."
• "Nowadays kids just sit inside playing around on the computer instead of playing with their friends outside."
• "Today's children grow up without learning proper social communication due to spending less time with their peers face-to-face."
• "It's ironic that social networks make us less social"
• "Technology stops us from connecting with the world around us"

Now raise your hand if you've ever seen stock photos like this before, used in stories about any of the above topics:

It's most likely that most of us will either have said some of these things or heard it from their friends. Hell, it's likely that most of you will even agree that this sort of easily accessible technology has made our collective social lives stale, our attention spans shorter, and our lives just generally worse off for it, since we no longer connect with the outside world as we once did when we didn't have all sorts of gadgets to distract us.

I'd just like to give you a friendly neighbourhood reminder of what it's like on the other side of the fence.

I suffer from social anxiety. Although I've almost always had some trouble connecting to people especially my own age, the problem only became increasingly problematic when I moved from high school to university. I put it down to the very structured life kids generally lead, compared to the unstructured, build-your-own sort of life that university thrusts at you -- but that isn't really the point. The point is that at pretty much every given time in my life, I've felt somehow isolated. There are a million and one things that I've blamed for that feeling of isolation, not the least of them being myself, but they aren't important to this post.

The exception to this rule of isolation is the internet. As a preteen, I got fiercely into text-based roleplaying games, the types one sets up on a forum (offline) and in chat rooms (online). Alongside the in-game part, I also became strongly integrated in the off-game communities the most successful of these games nurtured. The funny thing is that though I was part of a competitive sports team for six or seven years of my life, these online communities were the ones I felt that I belonged most strongly in. I could talk to people who had the same love for creative writing and fantasy as I did, and who seemed to have shared in my experience of isolation.

See, I mentioned that I was in a sports team. Unlike the stereotype, I did actively try to engage in the social community around me. However, I didn't always feel like the community around me tried to engage with me. These people on the internet, they got me. I felt like I was in a place where I could truly be understood, where people were on the same wavelength as I was. And even when this was not the case, for there were of course people on the internet, too, who did not share the same experiences as I did, somehow it was simply easier to communicate via instant messaging or forum posts. Despite what a lot of people, especially adults, around me said, there are definite ways of expressing the nuances of tone and intent just by using writing, by the use of punctuation and emoticons and simply by careful word choices. Similarly, communication over the internet allowed a sort of grace period, a pause in conversation longer than that  in face-to-face communication, in which I could think about exactly the right thing to say.

The internet was an important communication tool for me even outside friends I knew only over the internet. When I moved into a new country and thus an entirely new social environment, for a long time I depended on the internet to share thoughts and feelings I didn't dare to share with new friends face-to-face. I have since learnt to be more brave and outright about expressing myself, but were it not for the internet, I may never have been able to show any desire in expressing myself in the first place. In fact, I could go so far as to say that in some ways, being able to communicate with people on the internet has been like training wheels for me in terms of communicating with people in person. I've had a safe environment in which to experiment in -- an environment where I could instantly back away if I felt uncomfortable. I will go so far as to say that I don't think I would be able to talk to people the way I do if it weren't for the internet, as well as some very patient people who would listen to what I had to say where I had the courage to say it.

So the next time someone tells you that advancements in technology are sure to kill our social lives, remember that all they mean is social lives as they know. Remember that there are flocks and flocks of people like me who, were it not for the ability to communicate over the internet, IM, twitter, facebook, e-mail, even text message, may have ended up very depressed and alone.

Perhaps the only thing that this scaremongering is all about is that increasingly, people are learning to communicate like us.

Success Sometime In The Future

Today, I would like to share with you my award-winning* formula for Good Grades, Getting Things Done and General Success.

You see, I have spent most of my academic career, spanning all the way back to the beginning of primary school in 1999, attempting to work out the Best Method for Studying. I have always been that little kid who has to be absolutely perfect at everything. My parents are to this date somewhat puzzled about my obsession with grades, for they insist that they never enforced this attitude. In fact, toward the latter years of my compulsory schooling, their attitude had taken a steady turn toward "oh, another A? Cool." I have never been scolded for receiving occasional bad marks, even that one D that I once received for a history exam, for there have always been very good reasons for any of my failings.

As I began university, my study routine was merciless. I would take notes in class, and later transcribe the notes into Scrivener, giving them key words and sometimes adding graphics; even going to the effort of linking related lectures to each other via internal document links. In the study period before exams, I would then re-write these notes by hand, since I knew that the slower pace of writing by hand would force me to absorb the information more effectively.

For the first year and a half of my university career, I burnt out at least once a semester. Most of the time, I would manage to push this burnout toward the end of semester, just beyond exams, but at the beginning of this year, I burnt out halfway through semester. I even started having strange symptoms like sudden onset of dizziness and nausea that was never really properly explained.

That's when I decided that something had to change. I had suffered the physical symptoms of stress before, during my last year of high school, and they took me almost a year to fully recover from. I decided that I did not want to go down that road again, and so I set about re-evaluating my method of studying.

Despite my consistent efforts of not studying, I failed once more to obtain bad marks.

Hence, I can guarantee that the following method has been rigorously tested and subsequently judged to be functional. It has been approved by a panel of judges consisting only of myself for succeeding in upholding a pre-existing standard of excellence. Behold, this is the secret method by which good marks can be obtained, displayed in the most effective method of a flow chart:

Please note that this blog is not responsible for any destruction of property or harm to persons or grades caused by this flowchart.

Happy studying, everybody.

*Awards for best grades in my class for Literature and Chemistry at the end of high school, as well as some awards for achievement in the laboratory during my university studies etc.

Update: Epic Reading Quest

ETA: There are yet again links in this post that my theme swallows up for whatever reason. Anything italicised contains a link.

As some of you may remember, last year I embarked upon the Epic Reading Quest in order to cut down on my backlog of books. It's been a little over a year since I set upon this quest, so it's a good time as any to give a little update on how I'm going. To those of you who have visited my blog frequently over the past year, you would've possibly seen the "currently reading" books in my Goodreads page, shown in the gadget type thing on the right, changing over this past year.

You may also have seen a million "want to read" books popping up, but we don't talk about those.

Since the beginning of this quest in late August 2011 (though I didn't make the blog post on it until a month later), I've read 17 different books, of which almost all of these, excepting two, were in series of some sort. The unfortunate thing about this is that only four of these books were books that I have never read before!

Imagine that -- I somehow managed to turn a quest to cut down on my "not yet read" list to a "ooh I haven't read this book in a while and I remember how much I loved it"-fest. Oops?

Besides this, five of these books were even books that weren't on the list at all, but somehow managed to wrangle their way in, partially courtesy to my significant other and partially courtesy to my own short attention span.

13 of these books were in English, and four in Finnish.

Additionally, there are two books on this list that I began reading but couldn't finish (they're not listed in the totals, because that's hardly the point). One of these is Suzanne Collins' Mockingjay. I liked The Hunger Games, and I survived Catching Fire, though this survival was with considerable difficulty. By the time I got to Mockingjay, I just couldn't inflict that upon myself anymore -- not when there are better and more interesting books on my list. I won't lie -- it did grate on me a little to give up on a series when I got so, so close to the end; but that's my perfectionism speaking, and my love of lists, instead of any real desire to read that book. The other book that I began but couldn't get through was Robin Hobb's Fool's Errand, the first book in The Tawny Man trilogy. I've read this trilogy before, so not getting through this one wasn't a particularly huge tragedy when it comes to the Epic Reading Quest. I was a bit surprised not to get through it, though, because years ago, I loved these books. This time, I just felt annoyed and deflated by Fitz's constant angst, and in the end, decided to put the book down.

Tastes change, huh?

I'm currently reading Tolkien's The Hobbit in preparation for the upcoming film. After that, I'm yet again deviating from my list of upcoming books on my Epic Reading Quest to read Raymond E. Feist's Silverthorn. I blame my significant other for this -- we made a deal that involved him reading the Lord of the Rings trilogy if I read The Riftwar trilogy. It was a fruitful deal, and I'm hooked.

Perhaps after this, I will actually go back to my actual Epic Reading Quest list. I think that I'm going to have to clean it up a bit, perhaps taking some old favourites out and adding a few more new arrivals in, ones that were left out from the initial list. After I clean it up, I might post the list on here in its entirety, and maybe that will finally encourage me not to deviate from it overmuch.

Overall, I'm very satisfied with my progress. True, I haven't managed to read that many new books in this year. However, I've managed to establish to myself that I can read almost 20 books a year, even with university and work and all of those other things that take up my time nowadays. I've gotten used to reading again, and I think that's more important than anything else at this point. Besides, it's not like I've been buying more books, which is part of the pact that I made with myself until I finish this quest. I'm happy.