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. 

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.

The Correct Dosage of Education

"It's actually a little bit more complicated than that, but at this point you only really need to understand this much."

My beloved readers, I can't begin to express how frustrated I am with consistently having to listen to these words. This is an almost exact word-to-word quote that I could attribute to any of the at least 10 lecturers I have had in the past four semesters. Every single class, without fail, a lecturer will feel the need to both remind us that we are lowly undergraduates whose understanding of the world is severely lacking, and that their field is much more interesting and/or complicated than they lead us to believe.

There's nothing wrong with starting with the basics. In fact, there would be something severely wrong if the basics were completely ignored and more advanced things taught out of the blue. It's difficult to understand a concept you have no founding knowledge in (which is a completely different problem I may return to later). However, when every single lecturer in our undergraduate course can be heard saying this, there has to be something wrong, hasn't there?

Again, I understand that a lot of the concepts that we study could be studied in much greater detail (but if you go down that path, you'd require everyone to have PhD's in everything, which would be an interesting thing in itself). I understand that especially processes related to the biogeochemical cycle have a million different variables and are just as complicated as the almost-nonsense name would let you believe. I understand that there are plenty of things in science that are poorly understood. I still believe that when I am taught something, especially in a science course, I shouldn't have to take it on face value; I should be allowed to understand where and how and why this concept has come into being -- and I don't mean the tedious lesson on the history of this and that technique that every lecturer feels the need to include in their lectures.

I'm not saying it's not interesting. It's just that it's hardly ever examinable, and I've got too much examinable material to worry about in order to be able to fully appreciate some interesting non-examinable material.

Now, you could say that this is an avenue for independent study and that it is my responsibility as the student to go and find out more information on it. Unfortunately, this solution is a bit of a would-if-I-could, can't-so-I-won't type of affair.

You see, I complain a lot about how many assignments I have due and how much work I have and all the other complaints that you've heard all about by now. Usually it's not the assignments that gets to me -- homework isn't a foreign thing to me -- but it's the sheer volume of knowledge that I'm supposed to ingest and then digest during the course of the shortest of the short 12 weeks we call a semester. It's a bit ridiculous when you think about it: in a total of 72 weeks involving lectures, tutorials and labs, I am supposed to be eligible to graduate with a Bachelor of Science. That's 72 weeks of tertiary education. That's it.

Sometimes I don't even wonder why graduates aren't employed without significant work experience.

In that amount of time, it is impossible for both lecturers and some students (because I know there are those people out there who aren't massive nerds and are happy to get by with the smallest amount of work possible) to go into the amount of detail that they would like. I have heard this complaint from two lecturers already this semester -- that they may choose either to cover as much breadth as they possibly can by compromising the detail of some more complicated concepts, or they can sacrifice the breadth of our education for some more detail.

That's a situation I'm not particularly happy with. Sometimes I wish that our semesters were longer than just 12 weeks -- that our weeks were freer, that there were fewer assignments (or the same number spread over a larger amount of time) and more time to digest all of the information we are given.

I feel like university -- where I initially came to gladly to continue my education, since I have always loved academia -- as it currently stands, is destroying my love in science. And that, my friends, really sucks.

Sometimes I suspect that some of the world has yet to be convinced of how much of a dork I am. In such moments, I get a burning desire to reveal to everyone that I am, in fact, the dorkiest person you will ever meet. Here, and today, my friends, I present you the evidence!

You're welcome.

In seriousness, mounting tiredness and an ever-growing pile of assignments makes you do strange things.

The One Thing

During the course of this semester, one of my units has a decreased number of contact hours on the condition that we post lecture-related blog entries on the unit website during the semester. I just finished writing my first blog entry (two days into the semester. I'm a bit of an eager beaver). I looked at it for a while, shrugged, and figured I could post it here as well. Be warned: the blog entry is on the subject of science, it takes a slightly more formal tone than I usually write in, and it's aimed toward people who study science and are likely to end up being scientists at the end of their education. I would also give this specific one a "WARNING: SWEEPING GENERALISATIONS AHEAD" sticker if I had one.

Still, the sentiment at the end is warm and fuzzy. Hope you enjoy it!

The question of what I would teach the world if I could teach them just one thing about science has been plaguing me ever since the question was raised. To me, there is an obvious answer in the scientific method, which we understand to be the philosophy and the heart of science. Clearly, the scientific method is the key to understanding the practice of science, and possibly a further gateway to critical thinking. For some reason, however, this answer just didn't seem to fit the bill. No matter how long I thought about it, and no matter how many times I came to the conclusion that this was it, this had to be it, I couldn't manage to convince myself that I had the answer.

At length, I realised that this is because such a lesson is unlikely to make any sort of impact. Having gone to a high school with many art and music-centric students, my experience is this: unless a given person studies science, has at some point studied and/or enjoyed science or has some other external influence (such as a parent or sibling) which pushes them to science, there is very little general interest in science, how it works or why it is great. Were people like this given the lesson on the scientific method, I am almost certain that, while some of them may even find it interesting, they would at some length shrug it off as irrelevant. Though I firmly believe that it is important for the general population to understand and appreciate the pursuits of science, I also believe that teaching someone who does not want to be taught is only going to be a waste of time. It is frustrating for both the teacher and student.

In my experience, the reason for this disinterest is found in a perception of what science is. Those who have little or no science education tend to perceive science as formulaic, tedious and boring, studied from large, dusty tomes, far removed from the exciting, imaginative world of books, movies and art.

My answer to the conundrum is this: teach the world something about the vast creativity it takes to understand and practice science. Emphasise the lengths to which one has to stretch one’s imagination to even begin to relate processes occurring in the world around us to each other or to create laws which bind together all objects in the universe. Illustrate the magic of the moment when the experiment and theory come together perfectly. Perhaps this lesson would require some elaboration on the history of science, and on those remarkable people who have literally dreamt up all the theories (or foundations thereof) that now live in those large, dusty tomes.

Perhaps if we can successfully stimulate the imagination of those who write science off as formulaic or boring, they could be inspired to learn more about science and its methods by themselves. There is nothing that I would like more than to share the love, passion and enjoyment I know so many scientists have for their fields with every person in the world, so that they, too, might actually care about it when someone next talks to them about the scientific method.

Those stickers I mentioned at the start are totally the greatest idea ever. I'd stick them on everything for shits and giggles. Who knows how to make stickers?