Yesterday I submitted my final assignment for this semester finally ending my two week long binge of research, writing and sobbing.

It’s weird when the semester comes to an end. The routine you’ve drilled into your brain for the past 14 weeks suddenly stops because there are no more classes to attend, no more readings to do and no more assignments to stress over. My brain tends to panic at this point because it has been so conditioned over the years to expect the worse that it doesn’t quite believe that I’m on holiday. This means that for the next three weeks I will not be able to sleep past 8 in the morning without waking up in a complete panic over missing classes.

For everyone else there are exams. Exams breed stress. Stress breeds anger. Anger leads to the dark side. In recognition of this I thought I would share some basic exam and studying tips.

1 -Eat as much as you can
I’m bad at forgetting to eat when studying and this really impairs my memory. The best thing you can do is have a steady supply of healthy snacks to munch on throughout the day. Fruit is good for this. Strawberries, mandarins and bananas are great. Sugar and chips aren’t so great but sometimes you need sugar and grease.

2 – Sort out your sleep schedule
Classes are over so a bit of a lie-in is very tempting. When you’ve stayed up till 3 a.m studying this lie in begins to feel essential. The problem is that these long nights and late mornings can make getting up for a 9 a.m exam tough. Get your sleep sorted before the semester ends and you should be on track for exams.

3 – Take a break
This one seems obvious but when you’re caught up in the books you forget what time it is (and to eat). The best thing to do, or so I’ve found, is to put the books down and go for a walk or something. Watching TV isn’t such a good idea as I’ve found I tend to find it really hard to go back to the grind.

4 - Triple check your exam timetable
Last year I nearly missed a law exam because I thought it was in the afternoon. If I hadn’t checked after finishing studying I’d have been screwed. Write your exam time-table down and arrive early to all of them!

5 – Don’t Panic!
At the end of the day exams aren’t meant to be torturous. Even for vet students. If you’ve done your studying, attended at least 80% of your classes and you keep a cool head then there is no reason you won’t pass. If you start to panic just take a deep breath and think of the kitten video I posted last week.

Otherwise I wish everyone writing exams good luck. Also if anyone else has some tips please add them in the comment form!


Also just to be consistent!

Meet the sloths from Amphibian Avenger on Vimeo.

With one week to go until this semester comes to an end I am racing against the clock to finish all my assignments.

What I have to do by this time next week:

Write a total of 5000 words.
Prepare a photography portfolio.
Present a photography portfolio.
Write a test for Media Law & Ethics.

This is a super short post and for that I do apologise. Embedded below is a video I hope you will enjoy and accept as my apology. (I just searched the word ‘cute’ on youtube and picked the first video that came up)

I woke up about half an hour before my alarm this morning. This doesn’t happen very often but I was completely awake and half of my brain was desperately trying to find a way to justify getting up earlier than usual while the other half was quite content to simply slump back asleep. I was literally falling asleep when the wakeful half of my brain shouted (mentally) “If you get up early you’ll have time to get coffee before class starts!” This was a dirty trick and resentfully I got up and went through the motions of getting ready for class.

Last year I had a stomach problem that essentially meant I had to avoid coffee which made early morning lectures hell on me. I tried all the alternatives, eating an apple, drinking a glass of that fizzy vitamin stuff that’s meant to be good for you and even drinking 3 cups of tea but none of them worked. So it came as a bit of a surprise when I found myself coping better and better without my coffee fix. I was able to focus in class without constantly sipping at my caffeine drip and slowly but surely I stopped falling asleep in lectures. I’d broken the back of my addiction and would never again need to be dependent on a stimulant to keep me going through the day. I had won.

Sadly for me I started work at a cafe that provides free coffee for its staff and after only one day there I caught myself with a coffee in my hand. I hadn’t even been fully aware I was drinking it until it was far too late. Like a recovering alcoholic I fell off the wagon and I fell hard. Sure I rationalised that it was only one latte to help me get started in the day but soon I was getting coffee between lectures and then after lectures. Now all it takes is the promise of coffee to get me to wake up half an hour before I even need to. I am even sipping at a mug of coffee while I type this.

I guess what I’m saying is that it may seem like a problem but really there’s no problem here at all. If you’ll excuse me I need to go and peruse the bean selection at the grocery store now.

If this works and people enjoy it then I will make every effort to improve on the production values. Otherwise I apologise for what follows.

(Click poster for larger version) You can find more information on the Perth Youth Advisory Council website.

The same disclaimer found here applies to stuff in this post. Callum is a good friend of mine who kindly agreed to do a review of Blues & Roots as I was unable to attend. This festival was organised by Sunset Events who are in partnership with Murdoch University and provide cheap festival tickets to Murdoch students. Please thank Callum in the comment bar!

I was busy solving global warming this morning when one of my trusty agents within Murdoch sent me a coded pigeon message. Some kind of countdown had appeared on the strange coloured blocks on bush court and I was the only one that could get answers. Using the skills I learnt from watching zero episodes of 24 I broke into Murdoch’s office of Corporate Communication and interrogated one of the nice ladies about it. Despite asking as politely as I could all De was allowed to tell me was that something big was going to happen at three o’clock. I called Barrack and told him I needed to cancel our lunch, I had a much more important appointment to keep.

Jono’s blog has a sophisticated array of communication technology that allows us to go on scene anywhere in the world and report live. We have a news van with a satellite on it, a helicopter with a satellite on it and even a satellite with a satellite on it. Unfortunately the van was stolen, the helicopter is effectively useless as it can’t take off with the heavy satellite welded to it and we lost our satellite satellite when the Martians invaded last month. This meant I was forced to simply take my laptop and a camera up to campus and use twitter to annoy almost everyone who had no idea what was going on.

As my twitter feed will show Callum and I spent an entire hour trying to guess at what was going to happen when the countdown was finished. Our two prevailing theories were that it would either turn out to be a WMD or it would open up and release a drunken clown. Either way we were prepared to document the event and possibly fight a drunken clown to the death.

It would be fair to say that things were tense as the numbers entered the final countdown and we gripped our improvised anti-clown weapons tightly. Finally, the countdown and the words disappeared only to be replaced by....more words? Yes it seems Murdoch have not yet seen fit to give us all the pieces so we must wait for more information. Rest assured however that we will not rest until we manage to solve Murdoch’s version of the Da Vinci Code.

Regular readers will remember that at the end of last year there was a blogging assignment to do a chalk drawing and it was tied into personalised freethinking styles. My friends and I had a great time with this and our results still stain the wall to this day so it was pretty exciting to see more chalk drawings starting to pop up around campus.

Following the date Callum and I headed up to campus on the day to see what our “Murdoch Encounter” would be. We were a bit befuddled by the strange assortment of garbage assembled on Bush Court, none of it really resembling an encounter, but we persevered and were rewarded when some workmen came and set it all up.

I call the installation ‘it’ because I’m honestly not sure what ‘it’ is. It certainly seems to raise more questions than it answers and I have heard more than a few people express a small amount of frustration about the lack of a clear answer. The statements broadcast across the three screens probably didn’t do much to help as they were also quite cryptic.

Personally however I think this is better. We’re university students and we shouldn’t be spoon-fed the answers. The installation raises some interesting questions and paves the way for more exciting exhibitions on Bush Court which is empty far too often. Plus it looks pretty cool after dark when it transforms into a neon monster that is actually quite a bit of fun to photograph.

So recently we got hit by a massive storm. Considering what happened the last time we had a bit of lightning I think my panicked reaction was completely justified and I don’t think unplugging every single appliance I own was overkill. Thankfully the storm seemed to miss the Village and chose instead to wreak vengeance on the surrounding neighbourhoods, leaving some suburbs without power for up to three days.

So the survivors of the so-called “Great Storm of Perth” were understandably dismayed when another storm warning was issued the next day and it got more and more tense as we approached the afternoon. Obviously Perth weather really likes to mess with people as it was a beautiful day with only a few fluffy clouds floating about in the warm breeze and not a storm in sight. The point I guess I’m trying to make is that A) you can’t trust the weather people and B) you can’t trust the weather, people.

Otherwise Murdoch seems to be going on pretty much as normal. You may have noticed the chalk drawings in the photos below. I have been asked if I have anything to do with them and I can honestly say I have not. From what I have pieced together it is part of a Murdoch initiative called “Campus Encounters” that will presumably give away more information on the 29^th of March as suggested by the date in one of the photos.

Finally I thought I would end this update by talking about an exciting project called 365 postcards. Some of you may remember Kacy Mateljan from the blogging competition last year. Kacy has embarked on a pretty cool new project where she plans to send out one postcard a day for an entire year to anyone that sends her their address. Please head over to her blog and read up on it 365 Postcards

Also on a serious note some stuff has changed with the blog. Please check out this page for some important news.

Curiouser & Curiouser

Recently we’ve been hit by a heat-wave that has made living basically impossible. Normally I’m alright with heat, I mean I don’t like it but I can live with it. Sure without air-conditioning the flats in the village basically become cheap saunas and being inside for too long might bring on permanent brain damage but it’s just heat right? Well unfortunately my flatmates and I were destined to find out just how deadly a heat-wave can be.

Thursday night seemed just like any other night that week. Sure it seemed like the day hadn’t cooled down when evening came but at least at night you aren’t subjected to the piercing intensity of the Australian sun. I had elected to sit out on the balcony and do some reading before turning in for the night so I was feeling quite happy with the world as I drifted off to the land of nod where my dreams rose up to meet me like an old familiar blanket. At about 4 a.m my dreams began to twist into nightmares with resounding cracks and booms that drove me right back to the edge of wakefulness, no mean feat because I have a knack for sleeping through loud noises.
I lay in bed with my eyes barely open and was still nearly blinded by an intense flash of white light that seemed to sear its way across my eyeballs. This was it, I decided, the aliens had finally come and it was time for the real adventure to begin. Of course once I was fully awake I realised my mistake because Aliens would never announce their arrival in such a showy fashion. Rather it was a thunder and lightning storm with better special effects than most Hollywood films. I love watching lightning and thunder so despite the early hour I stared out my window for about half an hour until the storm seemed to die down and the rain began to fall in fat splatters. Naively I thought this would signal the end of the heat-wave so I climbed back into bed and drifted back to sleep.

My first sign that something had gone wrong should have been that my alarm clock didn’t go off in the morning which made me late for class which meant I didn’t have time to check my email in the morning. This series of unfortunate events meant I didn’t fully comprehend the significance of the thunderstorm until much later in the day when I was already worn out from Uni. So when I finally did get home and was sitting down with a cup of tea to check my emails and my bank balance I was confronted with the horrible truth. My internet was gone.

Truth be told this actually isn’t that uncommon in the Murdoch Village. The internet provider they have is slightly less reliable than simply plugging your Ethernet cable into a sand pit and hoping that it will magically give you broadband. So when my browser returned with the error message I’ve come to associate with Star-tech I wasn’t that fussed and simply returned to my book hoping to get some reading done before I could veg out in front of Today Tonight, my bad news show of choice. This was sadly to be part two of the bad news, the TV reception was out. I am pretty good at getting bad news these days after having extensive training throughout my life but this was still enough to make me curl up into a ball and whimper a little bit.

I was still on the floor in the lounge when my flatmate, Ariel, came through and asked me if my internet was working. This was to be a recurring theme throughout the weekend. Thankfully I worked for most of the weekend so I was at least out of the flat even if I did debase myself by using the customer wi-fi to check if I had new mail. My flat on the other hand rapidly began to resemble something out of Lord of the Flies as we are all confirmed internet addicts who really miss their regular hit of bandwidth.

Finally, when it seemed like we were all about to give up on civilisation and begin the inevitable devolution to Cro-Magnons, the lights on our routers began to flicker to life and our email accounts began to show renewed life. Slowly we put out the fires we’d started, unchained the residents we’d planned to sacrifice and life returned back to normal. However I don’t think I’ll ever look at a lightning storm again without recalling how it nearly destroyed the lives of four innocent people whose only crime was relying on technology for everything.

There seems to be a recurring theme for me of being completely unprepared whenever a new semester starts. One week I’ll spend waking up really late and playing video games in my underwear and then all of a sudden week one of University starts and I have to go back to wearing pants. That’s not to say that the date classes start isn’t made very obvious just that it always seems to take me by surprise no matter how many post-it notes and phone reminders I set myself.

Part of the problem is that there is always so much stuff that I need to buy and my brain deactivates in order to protect me from the realisation of just how much money I need to spend. The other part is that by the time semester starts I’ve really adapted to being on holiday and it takes me all semester to break out of the bad habits.

The point is that semester has started and I have been running around buying books, signing up for classes, showing up for classes and completely forgetting that I have a blog to update. This year promises to be quite interesting as I am focusing solely on my journalism minor so I get to take some pretty exciting sounding units such as Literary Journalism and Digital Photography. The down-side is that I know absolutely nothing about those units so I will have to work twice as hard to simply achieve my usual average.

Another feature of this year will hopefully be the appearance of some guest blog posts; I will try and get some other students to share their stories and their impressions of life in Perth and University. I’m hoping that some people will find this useful as they are probably getting a bit sick of reading my usual stuff.
Now I know this has been short but I am afraid I now have some reading to do before my lectures tomorrow.