I live in PERL

I woke up at 7:30am and made my way to SFU yesterday morning. I don't know if I should feel happy or sad that I was the only person on the 145 bus heading up to school. Who goes to school at 9:30 in the morning four days after Christmas? I do. Our lab is running a new treatment study, and I'm one of the people in charge of training our research assistants how to run participants through one portion of the study. So I went in early yesterday to be trained myself. I love being the first person in the lab. Everything is quiet and I usually set my things down and just head over to the kitchen to make myself a cup of tea. When I used to work Sunday mornings by myself, I actually take the water boiling machine from the kitchen so I don't have to leave the observation room. I actually don't need to be in the lab as much anymore because a large portion of my work can be taken home and now that I've learned about accessing our lab file space through FTP things are even more convenient! However, I do feel most productive during those early mornings in the lab with my cup of tea.

I'm starting a new job, by the way. I'm getting trained to be an ABA therapist or Behavioral Interventionist.

Catching up

Term papers, finals, and getting ready for the holiday season was hectic this year! I haven't been able to post at all. Well, I have been posting... but smaller posts here and there on my Tumblr account (http://genuinelypassionately.tumblr.com/) instead of here. Unfortunately I can't seem to find an application for Blogger for my phone. The only way I can post through my Blackberry is by emailing to blogger... which I have to say I'm somewhat weirded out by. Tumblr, on the other hand had an application which lets me posts things a lot easier. People who know me will know that I'm someone who ACTUALLY uses a blackberry to write her term papers while travelling. Having a Tumlbr account lets me blog things almost immediately in a super convenient way. It allows me to add blogging to my list of things I can do while I'm transitioning between things. So here's what I now plan to do: I'll post short and sweet little posts on Tumblr and then elaborate more on the posts here on blogger. 

Final grades this semester just raised my CGPA by another .1! I'm slightly disappointed. I did really well on three courses and even got 109% as a final grade for one but I didn't perform so well in my online course. I really hate online courses. If I can avoid them, I would. Unfortunately for me, more than 70% of my gerontology minor's courses are only offered online. Warning: ranting in this section. That being said, the professor was also really unfair in that he never provided constructive feed back, tested us on things he never even taught us or were in the reading r,  and "VERY WELL DONE" only deserves 78%. The course was an upper division course with only 20 students but yet the grades were put on a normal bell curve. In all the upper division courses I have ever taken in my undergraduate courses, I have never had a professor who felt that doing this was fair. A higher level of work is already expected in upper division courses, grades land mostly in the A range because of all the previous hurdles that we had to pass to get to that upper division course in the first place. Scaling grades in a class of 20 people who are already performing very well academically means that only something like 6 out of a class of 20 A range students can get A grades and so forth. Does this sound fair to anyone? Scaling grades so everybody does worse.  Instead of having a grade that reflected my level of mastery, my grade reflects how other people did in the class... not only that, the difference between how well other people did and how well I did is so small that the professor had to give out marks that differ in the hundreths position. Have you ever received a 20.78 or 25.64 on anything before? The most I've seen profs do is give out quarter marks like 20.75 or something, and that's in my lower division courses. This grading scheme was completely ridiculous! Being a student who is working to pull their CGPA back on from screwing up royally in first year, I like to actually receive reasonable grades that I deserve and not some grade that satisfies a f*cking gaussian curve because "the department says this is what's statistically normal." This prof and the people who force departmental grade scaling needs to take a stats refresher. Statistically normal usually only occurs in a SAMPLE OF INFINITY and will probably not occur in sample of 20. Idiots. End of rant. 

Read about my Christmas holiday on my tumblr! I had to do most of my blogging through my phone during lineups at the shopping mall and bus rides because I was out all the time.