The last strech

Not much to go:

_Final Year project due this upcoming Friday: Haven't started writing anything yet, should take me 2-3 all nighters..will be satisfied with an average grade.
_Energy Exam 29/10: 3 hours, should be very difficult. I still question the ability of the lecturer who took this course, I even feel weird calling him a lecturer considering his ''teaching'' abilities, or lack of.. and NO he doesn't do any research he doesn't even have pHd from what I know.
_Bio Exam 01/11: 3 hours, tough material to be examined on but should be relatively straightforward after a good 4-5 days studying.
_Design 12/11: Our final exam, 7.5 hours with half an hour lunch break. No idea why they need it to be that long.

Everyone I speak to tell me I am going to miss university life, guess what? I KNOW that, feeling pretty nostalgic already...the past 5 years have gone by very quickly. I am going to miss the campus. Miss running into random friends from other colleges whom I haven't seen in a while. Miss the bitching and moaning about assignments. Miss the possibility of annoying the lecturers. Miss the turf-war for computers in the computer suites. Miss Christchurch (despite the awful winters and the noisy drunks)....

JJ and Me

My researcher supervisor (JJ) has definitely a colorful character, but not a particularly friendly one. In fact, I get uncomfortable every time I am in a meeting with him.

He must be mid thirties, has a weird surname and a non-Caucasian look. In the first few weeks that he joined our department, I approached him with a friend in the initiation BBQ. After I found out where he's originally from I mentioned how I thought he might be of Middle-Eastern origin due to the last name and we talked a bit about Islam.
JJ: So is that the one where you guys have to go to a pilgrimage or something?
Us: Ya, it's said all your sins can be cleaned if you do that.
JJ: Oh, so you can rape and pillage then go there and you're good?
Us: ...............O_o
This sounds pretty bad, on his part. His tone showed ignorance rather than "Islamophobia" or whatever you call that. Either way, he's not worth my respect.

Also it seems he's going for a pseudo Gorge-Clooney look or something, he has full black hair but dyed the top part white and has it gelled so much that it makes a curve all they way down. And with that he still comments on people's hairs (mine). One day I had a meeting with another lecturer related to the same project (GZ, who is an awesome Argentine). So I didn't take shower that morning as there was no hot water, and it was raining heavily.. so my hair WAS pretty bad.
GZ: Aalii, what did you do to your hair? Is that a new hairstyle from Iran?
Ali: No no GZ, it's just the rain ya know.
We go see JJ in his office, as I walk in:
JJ: HOLY CRAP, what happened to your hair? It looks like you've just gotten out of bed.
GZ: Nooo JJ, that's new hairstyle that the girl's like, you're not up with the fashion!!
I cut my hair shortly afterwards I think.

Also he's got quite a potty mouth, I admit that I swear a lot but I am not a lecturer dammit!

Examples:

In a meeting:
JJ: Hmm this meter really needs to be .. *What the F*CK is this fly doing here, F*CK*
starts waving arms to get fly away.

When I was complaining about the crappy results I got:
JJ: You did many experiments, you should be more comfortable about your results. Like if I saw those results I would say "F*ck ya, we got good results", its the correlation that is crap.

In the lab with a technician talking about our experiment and how other students might need the equipment.
Technician: Problem is you got students coming on Monday to do the lab, what they gonna do?
JJ: They can get f*cked

He pretty much uses the F word in every second sentence. Oh how I hope to get this over with and get my mark (have a feeling its gonna be very crappy) and then I can tell JJ to go and sit on a pole...

Detoxing

Apologies to my readers, fans (ha!) and everyone who actually knows I exist in the blog world! I know you all miss my insightful yet extremely funny comments (haaaa!).

I have been very busy with the design project, its about 60% worth of a TRIPLE weighted course and it was a burden on my shoulder since the start of the year, even though it should be a burden on four shoulders.. I wasn't particularly happy with my team mates effort. One of them went to a music gig and didn't show up the night after it at all! The other one is just.. FRODO gosh...

Anyway, I think I pretty much spent around 50 hours on it the past 4-5 days before it was due (Monday 4th), pulling an all-nighter after another.. literally staying up from 11 am to 10 am the next morning then taking a nap and continuing 2 pm till 8 am the next day.. another nap ...

Fortunately we ended up handing it on time, although I wasn't particularity happy with some main sections of the report I was just too damn tired to add anything new. Here is what it looked like before we submitted it:I think it does look flattering, the large report is just appendix with calculations, drawings and a large chunk of references (muahhaha).

Now am trying to detox from all the crap I've taken to keep me going.
Plus lots of coffee and red bull. I gotta say that relentless drink(brown bottle) is craazy.. makes you twitch after the first sip.. I don't recommend it at all.

Hopefully now I can have time to read my favorite blogs and comment.

Obligatory Exam Rant

Bloody exams, aghhhh
Gotta whine and moan though, this was the 2nd to last exams I am EVER going to have, at uni.

In our university, we usually get 1 whole week before examsto study, called "study break". I spent couple of days of it writing my research project and then mucked around for another couple of days, barely managing to do 3-4 days of preparations...typical

Bioprocess Engineering:
First exam, and the easiest. I only needed 80% to ace the subject (since the exam was 25%) but I don't think I even did that. It was really awful to get that sterilization question which was the ONLY area I didn't cover very extensively, I read the notes and was like "oh I need to sit down and do this then ask the lecturer as I don't get it" but I forgot to do that. Teaches me a lesson for slacking and not starting to study properly until the very last day.

Process Economics:
Awful, awful, awful. I still can't believe how terrible the exam was. It wasn't hard, just the questions were not expected at all... I worked my ass out trying to understand those dumb economic terms and evaluation methods, and we ended up getting a question to actually do the actual calculations which I had no idea on. 3 out of the 4 exam questions were not very good for me so the worse-case-scenario mark I estimated is going to be horrid. Luckily everyone found the exam hard so it'll probably get scaled (funny incident in the exam when this classmate started crossing out her answers causing soo much noise due to frustration/anger, it looked like she was crossing out all her working, didn't even dare to ask her how did she find the exam haha)

Process Control:
Agh the topic I like to be good at. Noone expected a hard exam, open the exam and go through it "sweet, 2nd order question, cascase question, stability question.. awesomeeee" but as I started the first question you get this bloody stupid detailed model derivation that I was telling people is definitely not going to be in the exam(since its process modelling NOT control dammit agh). I believe the first question in an exam determines how well you do as it gives you confidence, the first question that I started doin annoyed me so much that it made me unsure about everything else. Aggggghhhhhh worse-case-scenario is much much lower than the typical worse-case-scenario marks I calculate... not good.

Exams over though, 3 weeks of semi-holidays (design project isn't going to be done by itself)... Yaaaaaaaaayyyyyyyyyyyy :D

What have I been up to

Well not much really, almost exclusively uni related:

_ I do not like to work with this classmate of mine, we worked on an assignment due on Friday. She is probably much smarter than me but put two intense/perfectionists together in a team and you can't get any good work out of them...I felt muted and unable to contribute to the assignment (apart from building the computer models) so ended up agreeing with whatever she wrote. She was also obsessed with editing the very small bits I added to the report aggggghhhhh

_ Had a job interview on Wednesday, it went alright and I was asked to go for another interview this Tuesday in the company's office. Not sure what to say, the company is tiny but does very interesting stuff. They have no "graduate programme" which can work in my advantage since it will probably allow me to get holidays back to Oman whenever I want. Biggest issue is that it is in Christchurch, I would like to live in another city. Unfortunately my mom is already expecting me to get back to Oman once I finish.

_ Got a contact through my lecturer to do a bit of "consultancy" work. The person wants to know why a certain mining company is buying less of their products. I will probably won't be able to help much but its good experience.

_ I still lament humanity and how fake friendship is in this day and age.. sigh

_ I know the importance of team work when you "get out there in the real word" but I am sure if certain people do not care about their work/project they would be fired, unfortunately this is not the case here at uni. Had another case study were 2 members of a team of 5 were not doing anything... and when I tell one of them in a stern way to complete this task I get called a "dick" siiiiiigh and worse of all I didn't give him a piece of my mind the wanker

_ I have to finish my research project and hand it in by Monday. I haven't started writing anything yet and typically they should be between 20-40 pages long so let's see how it goes.

On that note I think I should go and make a start at least.

What about Africa?

Last week we had a Process Control lab as part of one of my courses and it involved 6 other students (forming two groups). There was also the lab demonstrator (postgrad student from Nigeria, call him B).

I will spare you the technical details, but the lab involved two sets of identical tanks with water flowing throw them continuously and then going through the drain while maintaining a constant level. They have two sets so that two experiments could be done simultaneously, for both groups. Anyway the first part we did the experiments in part of our groups but for the second one apparently one of the tank's sensors wasn't working so we did the second part together.

Classmate: "Should we stop the water supply to Tank A"
B: "No do no worry about it"
Me: "What about the steam heating the water? we're just wasting steam for nothing"
B: "You pay your fees, correct?Do not worry about it!" *heavy African accent*

I was a millisecond away from bursting my typical quote "BUT THINK OF AFRICAAAAAAAAAA" until I remembered he's Nigerian. Ahh it would've been soo sweet if I said that and see his reaction, damn.

Actually this reminds me of the hypocrisy surrounding me, wasn't earth hour a while ago where everyone turned their lights off? (I didn't as I wasn't home at that time, wouldn't have turned it off anyway) well NZ and espeically my university seems to really endorse this whole "environmental awareness etc..." am all for that but I find it annoying that in Christchurch they never turn the shops lights off at night, this was the first thing I noticed when I first went to town at night and all the retail shops had their lights left on. Also driving back from uni at 2-3 am I always see many MANY departmental buildings leaving their lights on.

Why I hate holidays

I can't get any bloody work done, *$%*()@*$@

With Easter we got a long weekend where we got off Friday, Monday and Tuesday. Sweet 5 days to catch up on my research project and read more about solar technologies for my design( (solar power plant in NZ, how brilliant is that).. WRONG! I couldn't get anything done. Read a bit for my research and attempted the tests I wanted to do but nothing worked out so I gave up! Then didn't do anything for my design until 10 pm Tuesday evening, which brings me to my position now trying to cram as much as I can before I meet up with my group tomorrow.

Oh and before anyone labels me a nerd, I love holidays but not the ones that come straight after uni started and break any "momentum" I have established. I would much rather they added few extra days to the mid-semester break instead.

End of summer research

Yes yes.. it is true.. I am DONE with that project, albeit it wasn't as successful as I had hoped.
I obviously didn't get to write a coherent article, let alone get it published. I blame the materials, equipment, biochemistry, whoever discovered PEG and the pipettes and hmmm myself!

So ya, the new material was like a unicorn. The chemist kept telling me its going to take anther week and I had been waiting for three weeks until he realized he can't purify it with the traditional methods. He tried explaining the details of it but to be honest, I wasn't interested at all.. basically it was dissolving in solvent so we had to use a special type of Ion Exchange column which we didn't have or something. So anyway, I ended up having to write a report explaining my method, my results and why they are so crap. Some final year student, i.e. one of my classmates, is going to take this project this upcoming year if the supervisor thought there is hope to salvage it, so my report should give them a clear idea of what previous was was done. If I was honest, I would never have given the report in the way I did if it actually contributed any marks. It was waaaay below my standards but thats not what I intended it to be, its meant to be a guide for whomever is going to continue the project. So now I just have to wait for the supervisor to approve the report (otherwise I have to fix it) and then they can give me the rest of the money for the project.

My next project is actually going to be my graduation project... no more biochemistry but it involves mass transfer.... the discipline that I find the hardest in Chemical Engineering. BUT I am looking forward to it, I was promised it is going to be practical so let's see.

Although uni officially starts on Monday 25th, this upcoming week is going to be busy with me getting a job in the enrollment center. It is heaps of fun acting all important and getting to stamp applications of your fellow students.. also I get to finish my enrollment when the queues are gone... awesome :D