A Thousand Years by The PianoGuys
Oh everything is so beautiful right now!
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The semester is finally over. It was a hectic one. It ended by me, submitting my final paper of the semester and sure thing it is going to be a blast, where I will start it off by going Downtown to have fun tonight for the first time. I wonder how it is going to turn out.
Nevertheless, today's weather isn't going to be a great one as we have been getting warnings, all over the television and the radio, even from the campus email that there will be a thunder storm coming our way. "Thunder, damaging winds and hail are likely" does not sound very good to me.
Was bidding goodbyes with Yee Jin's beloved roommate (no one is going to play Battlefield while I sit aside and watch until Fall semester :( :( :( Am going to miss Joey daddy almost teddy hair!! )
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Immediately after, raced ahead of the storm to Beaumont to submit my paper. Oh hell yeah it made my day! Not only I got to end the semester officially, I also got to hear once more from the lecturer, Dr. Morales. He was such a great lecturer this semester, providing us with whatever we needed to pass the class. This Jr. Psych Seminar class was definitely a hectic one. Hands down. At least two journal papers to read each week with the same amount of reaction paper to write. Throughout the semester, we have read and written 25 papers in total, not to mention how all of the journal papers are at least 20 pages long!! Each person in the class should also choose two topics in the semester to present to the class but that was not too tough a job, just have to keep your fingers crossed that you would manage to bring up an attention-grabbing question that allows the whole class discussion to facilitate itself and drag on for at least quite some time. My second presentation failed at that, due to the ridiculously tough paper that I chose that no one in the class could fully understand it, well except for the lecturer. We should also participate in the discussion during each class presentation to gain participation points as well. That was rather easy until you find out towards the end of the semester that he actually writes down the valuable points that you bring up during the class discussion and check off at the box several times that you have "talked".
The last requirement of the class was to write a seven page literature review with at least 10 empirical studies as reference. Now this was mind-blowing. Going through all 10 studies, opened up on Adobe was tough enough. Added on to that was the actual paper that you have to write in APA format. Going back and forth a million times between the articles and Microsoft Word was hectic enough to make a MacBook Pro lag a little (without any other background programs like Chrome running). I think after spending approximately 24 hours excluding other activities such as eating and sleeping, I managed to put a period to the paper at an 8 1/2 mark. What came after was the front cover and the reference page that added the numbers to 12 pages. The draft came back looking pretty with only several grammatical errors, which I have to fix for the final paper. Oh how easy was that to secure full marks for the final paper!! Definitely A for that paper. Hopefully A for that class.
Anyway, I digress. After submitting my paper, Dr. Morales leaned back into his big black office looking leather chair and looked at me. "Thank you for joining my class this semester, you were a great student. I am really happy to have you as my student this semester. You write really well. You are the best student in the class. You impress me." These words mean so much to me. SO MUCH! To be able to get a lecturer to say those words to you is beyond imaginable. Not to mention that I am an Asian. I am really glad I chose to come to SUNY Plattsburgh in the first place. Despite it being a small school in a small town, I was able to get all the attention that I needed from my lecturers and I don't think that I would be able to get a lecturer to know me that well and even see the potential in me if I were to go to much bigger and well-known schools that I had been accepted to such as University of Minnesota, SUNY Stony Brook or SUNY Buffalo!
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Back to being able to write well in English, I really have to thank Blogger for providing me a place to rant since 2006. This has been a really good learning place for me to improve my English writing from dust to pearl in the making. I wouldn't say that my writing is perfect because there is still much more to improve on. My dad has been an angel since I was a young girl, buying me all the Singapore English syllabus grammar books and teaching me so patiently, answering all my what why questions, giving me the same old examples to explain grammar, which were incredibly helpful for understanding (I do use back the same examples when explaining grammar to my other friends whom are learning English).
"Johnny goes to school every morning."
"Johnny always goes to school by bus."
GOTTA LOVE IT!
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This semester has been a really good one! Really!
I have incredible lecturers. Not to mention the rather lenient Dr. Gordon, who was teaching the SUPER BORING Library class, he made the class easy to get an A, plus, I actually learned some research methods from that class!
Dr. Wendy was an angel. Her usual classes were nothing tough, just printing handouts and going to class to take down GOOD notes. Exam was based SOLELY on the things that she talked about in class. Nothing surprising and she was always there to help you get good grades. Took both Cognitive Psych, Learning and Memory under her at the same time and I really liked those classes!
Husband of Dr. Wendy would be Dr. Mansfield. Took his class on Gen Psych Lab last semester and I had a blast! Ended up with a 99.48% out of 100%. So good that he invited me (when I was in Chicago) to do research with him through an email! Accepted his invitation and this semester was rather interesting doing research with him on Low Vision reading with Abbreviations. Always energetic and bubbly, that lecturer, with his lovely British accent never fails to make your attention drift away. A great motivation for you to do well in class too!
Hoping for another 4.0 GPA this semester, continuing the trend of last semester. Fingers crossed. To date, three of five subjects has been confirmed. More to come!
"Success means having the courage, the determination, and the will to become
the person you believe you were meant to be." - George Sheehan
Welcome to my life pretty Summer days!
Note: Oh gotta love those pretty dandelions :P
With much love,
Pei Ning
