APA Style.

I recently confirmed that I really hate doing group projects. I'm in Applied Gerontology this semester, and this requires us to do conduct a study on our own. I'm in a group with a social loafer, an older woman, and a nervous wreckball of a "team leader."

I was recently accused by this "team leader" of PLAGIARIZING and not knowing how to cite properly using APA Style. If I could have sent her a slap via email, I would have. Those who are in psychology know that EVERYTHING we do have to be in APA (speaking of which, did you know that new APA guidelines call for two spaces after each period?). She had "edited" my portion of our lit review for our research proposal and added citations where "she thought was needed." I had already cited my sources, and the paragraphs were basically summaries of the study and how I interpreted the graphs and data. She later changed the back to back citations of the same article to Ibid. to "eliminate some of the noise" in our lit. review. When I rebutted and showed her proof that you can indeed paraphrase and summarize things without citing every sentence (as long as the author has been credited) she told me "she stands corrected" and fears that if she didn't "fix" my citations we would fail our project on the grounds of plagiarism. She then emailed our group and commented on how "some of the members in our group" are "inadequate" in their ability to write in APA style leaving her to do all the work. The worst part is the rest of my group just follows her like blind sheep. This is a woman that also freaked out over the order of the prof's powerpoint slides.

I really hate group projects. I really hate being told I can't write in APA style even though it's all I wrote in for the last 4 years. I hate sheeple. Oh, and I hate being the youngest person in a class of people who all have a degree already. Nobody listens to me, and nobody takes my suggestions seriously.

I need more days off.

I don't think my family understand the amount of work I have on my plate. I hate how my mom expects everyone to work around her schedule and how she's not in the very least accommodating or understanding of other people's situations. My dad just thinks that I'm lazy and that I don't care about the family.

This is really frustrating. Neither of them have been in university, so they don't understand the work that comes with a degree. They don't get that I'm working hard to get into honours or to boost up my CGPA to get into grad school. All they know is: I'm never home for dinner, washing dishes is my last priority, and I do nothing but "my own stuff." I don't think they realize how hard it is to get into grad school and that this is what I need to focus all my energy on. I do what I can around the house already. I clean when there are people coming over, I clean my own room, I wash the dishes, I do the laundry and when I have time I try to help out wherever I can. Then my dad comes into my room and starts a screaming match with me because I haven't done the dishes tonight yet and so that means I don't do shit around the house because I simply don't care.

My mom also recently got me a gig of typing up transcripts for the dermatologist she works for. I'm sorry but this gig is probably the second last thing on my mind right now. The last being the dishes. All my parents do is scream at me for not caring about their shit but do they care about mine? I really wonder. I really just want to move out  so I can focus on my work and actually use my spare time to do something for myself. I just wanted a breather after dinner and my mom started bitching at me for watching tv, then I come into my room to check my email and my dad comes in and bitches at me for not doing anything.

I used to think that once I'm successful in my career that I'd take care of the two of them and get them a house near my own... now I'm not so sure. Why should I take care of people who don't even think I care about them? Why should I care for stupid selfish people who think that everything they know is right? Why should I give a shit about two people that never even really gave a shit about me.

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. 

Association of Cognitive and Behavior Therapy Conference

Good bye snowy Vancouver! Hello hopefully sunny San Francisco!

Statistics.

The last week has been super busy and so I haven't posted until now.

On Monday, I had a statistics assignment due and because the SPSS on my home computer was not working, I couldn't do my analysis until Monday morning... an hour before the assignment was due. Panic pretty much kicked in once I stepped into the computer lab and I was getting frustrated because I can't do this simple analysis that I've done a million times before. The numbers on the screen meant nothing to me. I ended up having to ask for an extension because I just couldn't wrap my head around the assignment.

Yesterday, after my statistics class, I was working on another statistics assignment. Fortunately, I was on a roll this time and so I knew exactly what I needed to do and how to do it. Around 12:30 my tummy grumbled and so I looked into my bag only to remember that I did not pack a lunch. The closest place I can purchase food is a good 10 minutes away and at 12:30 the lines would be long too. I looked at the assignment in front of me, and my tummy grumbled again. Statistics vs. food...  statistics win. I ended up buying a pizza pretzel on my way home at 3:30.

On a happy note, I'm leaving for the ABCT Convention tomorrow morning! Sunny California, here I come!

Nov 11

The university is closed today for remembrance day. The buses and halls are practically empty but that doesn't necessarily mean that my lab is empty. In fact, it just feels like another day in the lab. My brother and I both woke up at 7 and left the house at 8, but for completely different reasons. He serves in the canadian Forces and so he has to be in a Remembrance Day ceremony. I had to go to my lab because I was expecting a participant and I have a meeting there later on in the day. You know you've been integrated into my lab when you actually don't mind, if not prefer, working there on holidays, weekends and even in the wee hours of the morning. My participant today was scheduled for 10am, but I always prefer getting to the lab an hour early to settle in and set up. The guy today has already stood me up last week and so i called him last night to make sure he's coming. Unfortunately, I got stood up again. I was pretty upset because he promised he'll be here. He didn't call until 3:00pm to tell us he can't make it. Thanks buddy... You could've called 5 hours ago. I worked on my stats homework for a while but my brain just isn't working with me and so I just constructed the F-ratios, did some power calculations, ran my data through SPSS  and left it at that.

One of the other research assistants came in later and told me about a shoe sample sale and so I decided to check it out as I'm leaving campus. Half a warehouse full of size 6 shoes!! I was in shoe heaven. My normally heavy bag became light in comparison to the basket of shoes I was carrying. I had to empty it out several times but still ended up having two full baskets by the time my boyfriend came to get me. He took one look at my baskets and said, "honey, you realize you'll have to narrow it down right?" I ended up buying 2 pairs of super cute flats and a pair of heels, BUT THERE IS MORE! The shoe sale was buy 1 get one free!! So, I ended up getting 6 pairs of shoes, a pair of flip flops for next summer, 4 pairs of flats and a pair of heels. I had some Buyer's remorse afterwards but it was well worth my money.


It took me a long time to post this one because I actually wrote half of it on the way to the shoe sale and completely left my mind once I stepped into the warehouse, but there you have it. My Remembrance Day in a nutshell.