Daily life in Wales
Door: Sarajan Graanoogst
Blijf op de hoogte en volg Sarajan
20 April 2014 | Verenigd Koninkrijk, Cardiff
Since I have devoted most of the chapters written up to this point to all the exciting and non-ordinary experiences I have decided to mix it up a little. In this chapter will solely focus on describing the ordinary week in Cardiff. Since there have been two different schedules I will describe them each in turn with brief descriptions of how I have experienced the courses I have followed in these periods.
In the first period it was clear from the beginning that I would have more spare time than before. With only 2 lectures a week I had time to train an average of 2,5 times a week and still have time to go out (or at least attempt to) relax at home with my guitar on my left knee or playing a game on my laptop (on the dark and gloomy days). When it wasn’t gloomy I usually explored the city, shopped for groceries, but spent at least some time outside. The courses I followed in the first period were relatively easy to follow. Supply Chain Management, on the Monday, required no preparation at all and even though I learned a few handy tools for analysis (like Supply Chain Mapping) I was surprised to discover that there were no “difficult” formulas or algorithms to learn. Most tools we were learnt were to provide an overview and insight in supply chains. The other course that I followed on the Tuesday, was also not very challenging, but it was very rewarding for a programming course. Computational methods was all about writing code in VBA (excel) to perform calculations. I had to get used to it in the beginning, but having programmed in Delphi I got the right way of thinking fairly quickly and the rest of the course was a breeze. It was scheduled for 9.00 to 16.00. Each lecture would start in the lecture hall and when the day’s material had been explained and examples had been given we were shipped off to the lab rooms to work on a few problems. I usually got the idea of what we were supposed to do and even varied from the course exercises a bit to make it even more interesting (I usually finished with time to spare). When the coursework was handed out I had a pretty solid framework in a few days and spent the rest of the time until the deadline making the layout and interface look nice.
When the second period came around things changed. Since I had now three lectures a week I was bound to have less time. Among these courses there was however only one I had to work really hard to keep up. The other two courses “Time Series and Forecasting” and “Health Care Management” were very comprehensible. “Advanced use of Statistical Packages” however was indeed advanced stuff. That course really provided a challenge for me. This was mostly due to the fact that the material was not taught to us. No our professor insisted that the best way to learn it was to figure out everything for ourselves. He provided a few readings, some examples he had made on video and that was it. Even very to the point questions resulted in answers like: “have you tried googling it?” or “have you tried asking your fellow students?” Not being used to this form of self-teaching I was frustrated a lot of the time. Programming is inevitably built up from these actions: making sense of the problem (what task should your code perform), figuring out what code can perform the desired actions, followed by an iterative process of writing code, testing it, improving it as errors occur until the code does what is required of it. And the really good coders add another step, “making the code more efficient”. Now I usually got stuck at the debugging phase as the programming languages (packages) used had no debugging tool that we were taught that would help in this process. In VBA I just watched what happened to the variables used in the code and figure out what went wrong before proceeding to fix it. With this course I got errors and either I understood them or I didn’t. And if asking questions about the error leads to: “have you googled it?” I tend to get very frustrated. To be honest I have learnt some skill, but I still despise the manner in which the course was taught.
In both periods I usually rushed home after lectures (especially on Monday, Thursday and Friday) in order to get ready for training. However, me being me, I attempted to finish the day´s task of the course on the program of that day.
Fencing really proved to be the place where I would make friends. If you have come this far you probably already know about most of them. So I´ll introduce a few new characters. Flavia from Venice who is one of the women´s team main foil fencers, Sam a fervent sabreur (who I have learned later could have been Harry Potter instead of Daniel Radcliff), Zach a staunch epeeist, two Ethans one a very good sabreur and the other a very good foil fencer. Last but certainly not least Katie. The first time I met her and got to talking to her (after a Thursday training session) we ended up talking until about 2 AM. She has studied history, will continue next year, and clearly has passion for the subject. She loves the details, even the gory ones, and clearly has not the over-romantic view of the Middle Ages and other historical periods. Other interests we share apart from our love for historical stories, buildings are sports, traveling and reading. Obviously fencing is a shared interest, but add to that archery, martial arts, horse-riding (it’s on our bucket list) and our love for traveling to places with historical sites and the types of books we both like and the similarities become uncanny. Since that night I have spent more time with her, mostly to plan a collective trip to London, but also to see the movie frozen. And on the agenda (not yet with a fixed date) are a risk and monopoly evening (both with lord of the rings theme) and a “brinner” which basically is a kind of sleepover party (without sleeping I think) where we enjoy typical breakfast food in our pj’s and do other nice activities.
In other words I have once again a lot of fun things to look forward to. And with all of these things on the horizon I should be able to summon more than enough discipline to get through weeks of study and doing work on course work (projects). Add to that the fact that I’ll have a long holiday afterwards and a regained freedom to go traveling again to London (with Katie) and to Stonehenge near Salisbury, Tintagel castle in Cornwall, Sherwood forest and Scotland (specifics to follow) and I get enough energy to punch my way through those assessments (have I shared my philosophical comparison of exams with battles? Set a strategy and defeat the opponent, be it an army, one single opponent or you guessed it an exam question).
So yeah the exams do not fill me with trepidation anymore. Just two individual projects, one group assignment and two exams and I will be free. Well that was it for this installment next time I will feature in a few short stories. I will try an experiment of writing my story from another perspective, but if it doesn’t work out right I will probably go back to my usual style.
Stay with me!
In the first period it was clear from the beginning that I would have more spare time than before. With only 2 lectures a week I had time to train an average of 2,5 times a week and still have time to go out (or at least attempt to) relax at home with my guitar on my left knee or playing a game on my laptop (on the dark and gloomy days). When it wasn’t gloomy I usually explored the city, shopped for groceries, but spent at least some time outside. The courses I followed in the first period were relatively easy to follow. Supply Chain Management, on the Monday, required no preparation at all and even though I learned a few handy tools for analysis (like Supply Chain Mapping) I was surprised to discover that there were no “difficult” formulas or algorithms to learn. Most tools we were learnt were to provide an overview and insight in supply chains. The other course that I followed on the Tuesday, was also not very challenging, but it was very rewarding for a programming course. Computational methods was all about writing code in VBA (excel) to perform calculations. I had to get used to it in the beginning, but having programmed in Delphi I got the right way of thinking fairly quickly and the rest of the course was a breeze. It was scheduled for 9.00 to 16.00. Each lecture would start in the lecture hall and when the day’s material had been explained and examples had been given we were shipped off to the lab rooms to work on a few problems. I usually got the idea of what we were supposed to do and even varied from the course exercises a bit to make it even more interesting (I usually finished with time to spare). When the coursework was handed out I had a pretty solid framework in a few days and spent the rest of the time until the deadline making the layout and interface look nice.
When the second period came around things changed. Since I had now three lectures a week I was bound to have less time. Among these courses there was however only one I had to work really hard to keep up. The other two courses “Time Series and Forecasting” and “Health Care Management” were very comprehensible. “Advanced use of Statistical Packages” however was indeed advanced stuff. That course really provided a challenge for me. This was mostly due to the fact that the material was not taught to us. No our professor insisted that the best way to learn it was to figure out everything for ourselves. He provided a few readings, some examples he had made on video and that was it. Even very to the point questions resulted in answers like: “have you tried googling it?” or “have you tried asking your fellow students?” Not being used to this form of self-teaching I was frustrated a lot of the time. Programming is inevitably built up from these actions: making sense of the problem (what task should your code perform), figuring out what code can perform the desired actions, followed by an iterative process of writing code, testing it, improving it as errors occur until the code does what is required of it. And the really good coders add another step, “making the code more efficient”. Now I usually got stuck at the debugging phase as the programming languages (packages) used had no debugging tool that we were taught that would help in this process. In VBA I just watched what happened to the variables used in the code and figure out what went wrong before proceeding to fix it. With this course I got errors and either I understood them or I didn’t. And if asking questions about the error leads to: “have you googled it?” I tend to get very frustrated. To be honest I have learnt some skill, but I still despise the manner in which the course was taught.
In both periods I usually rushed home after lectures (especially on Monday, Thursday and Friday) in order to get ready for training. However, me being me, I attempted to finish the day´s task of the course on the program of that day.
Fencing really proved to be the place where I would make friends. If you have come this far you probably already know about most of them. So I´ll introduce a few new characters. Flavia from Venice who is one of the women´s team main foil fencers, Sam a fervent sabreur (who I have learned later could have been Harry Potter instead of Daniel Radcliff), Zach a staunch epeeist, two Ethans one a very good sabreur and the other a very good foil fencer. Last but certainly not least Katie. The first time I met her and got to talking to her (after a Thursday training session) we ended up talking until about 2 AM. She has studied history, will continue next year, and clearly has passion for the subject. She loves the details, even the gory ones, and clearly has not the over-romantic view of the Middle Ages and other historical periods. Other interests we share apart from our love for historical stories, buildings are sports, traveling and reading. Obviously fencing is a shared interest, but add to that archery, martial arts, horse-riding (it’s on our bucket list) and our love for traveling to places with historical sites and the types of books we both like and the similarities become uncanny. Since that night I have spent more time with her, mostly to plan a collective trip to London, but also to see the movie frozen. And on the agenda (not yet with a fixed date) are a risk and monopoly evening (both with lord of the rings theme) and a “brinner” which basically is a kind of sleepover party (without sleeping I think) where we enjoy typical breakfast food in our pj’s and do other nice activities.
In other words I have once again a lot of fun things to look forward to. And with all of these things on the horizon I should be able to summon more than enough discipline to get through weeks of study and doing work on course work (projects). Add to that the fact that I’ll have a long holiday afterwards and a regained freedom to go traveling again to London (with Katie) and to Stonehenge near Salisbury, Tintagel castle in Cornwall, Sherwood forest and Scotland (specifics to follow) and I get enough energy to punch my way through those assessments (have I shared my philosophical comparison of exams with battles? Set a strategy and defeat the opponent, be it an army, one single opponent or you guessed it an exam question).
So yeah the exams do not fill me with trepidation anymore. Just two individual projects, one group assignment and two exams and I will be free. Well that was it for this installment next time I will feature in a few short stories. I will try an experiment of writing my story from another perspective, but if it doesn’t work out right I will probably go back to my usual style.
Stay with me!
Reageer op dit reisverslag
Je kunt nu ook Smileys gebruiken. Via de toolbar, toetsenbord of door eerst : te typen en dan een woord bijvoorbeeld :smiley
