I've got a feeling...

...that this week's gonna be a good week!

I don't have anything due this week except a maths assignment I'm nearly finished, PLUS there's the Ekka holiday on Wednesday, so I figure this is a great chance to

1. get ahead on my uni work
2. finalise my vac work applications, since a lot of places I'm interested in are closing end of this month
3. find some subjects to do on exchange!

I have to formally apply by the 31st of October to go on exchange next year in semester 2.  It feels so weird having daydreamed about it for years, and now having to actually set the plans in motion!  I had a chat to my academic advisor about it the other day* and I'm now at the stage of having to choose subjects to get approved by the faculty.  I'll need to start brushing up on my German so I can navigate the uni websites :)

*something I had been meaning to do for some time, but somehow never got around to actually doing.  But it was excellent.  Uni people are not out to get you, they are quite happy to let you take the most reasonable option - I had some tricky courses to work out because of how my double degree is affected by the recent course restructure but I'm really impressed with how reasonable everyone was.  I was expecting a whole lot of bureaucracy and red tape and people demanding that I follow the rules to the letter, to the extent that I was panicking that I'd have to add an extra year to my degree!  Of course that wasn't even close to the case, so three cheers for academic advisors :)

Calcumalations

"I just need 70% to pass." (alt: I just need 102% to pass)

"If I can somehow get 95% on the final I'll get a 7... so what's a pointer again?"

"Why am I wasting time on this 1% question when I could be studying for the final?"

So I've done some calculations to mentally prepare myself for the upcoming semester, and they basically reinforce the lesson I learned at the end of my first semester at uni.  And relearned every semester since:

The more marks you get during semester, the fewer marks you need on the final.

I've got a spreadsheet which I've modified from previous semesters, which basically lists all my assessment pieces and their weightings for each subject, and as I get marks back I enter them into the spreadsheet and it tells me numbers like how much I need on the final to get a 7, say, or how many marks I've accumulated compared to how many marks I could have got so far.  And generally what happens is as the semester progresses I watch the marks slip away and wish I'd paid more attention to those darn one-percenters!

So this semester I decided to try out some numbers before I got the marks back, just to get an intuitive feel for how much each assignment I miss/mess up will affect my final mark.  The results:

If I get 100% in every pre-exam assessment, I'll need the following percentages on the exam to get a 7:

79%, 63%, 67%, 70%.

If I get 80%:
87%, 93%, 91%, 90%

I get some surprising results sometimes.  For example, that second subject has a lot of small assessments and a fairly small (40%) final exam.  If I get 75% across all those small assignments, I need a perfect final for a 7; if I only aim for a 6 I just need 75% (obviously).  When I go into finals, my thinking process goes something like "there's only 10% difference between a 6 and a 7 so I'll just need 85% or so, maybe a bit extra to make up for those assignments I missed but I'll be right".  Which is totally wrong!

Anyway, imagining an exam block where I only need 63% to get a high distinction has inspired me to study extra hard on those insignificant assignments!  I just spent the better part of today finishing off two such assignments (and just in case anyone else spends three hours and five A4 pages searching for the reason her final answer is out by 3.07... THE MOMENT OF INERTIA OF A SLENDER ROD ROTATING ABOUT ITS CENTRE OF MASS IS DIFFERENT TO THAT OF ONE ROTATING ABOUT ONE END) and I'm pleased to say that possibly for the first time in my life I've handed in an assignment before the day it was due.

Of course, I'm probably going to remember an error in my working in the middle of the night and kick myself for handing it in too soon.  Maybe next time I'll just smile to myself in satisfaction and hand it in on the proper day :)

Road Trip!

Yes, that's me! Lord (lady?) of all I survey...

Okay, I'm not quite there yet, but one day I will be.  For now I have to start at the beginning - an emergency trip to Lowes for that stylish blue work shirt you see in the picture there.  This was for a QRC student ambassador trip to two sites in the Darling Downs - Peabody Energy's Wilkie Creek coal mine and Origin Energy's Darling Downs power station.  And since safety comes first in this industry, before we even left Brisbane I needed a collared shirt with long sleeves, which for some reason I've never owned before.  I've also been meaning to get myself my own pair of safety boots, but for this trip I settled for borrowing a pair at each site.  Trying to work out the differences between men's and women's sizing flustered me quite a bit at first!

Okay, onto the less trivial parts of the trip...

Wilkie Creek's General Manager, Blair Jackson, was our very informative guide for the first session of the day.  He and the rest of the staff we spoke to really impressed me with their commitment to safety, community relations and the environment and mine rehabilitation.  Wilkie Creek actually grew a 5-acre crop of sorghum on previously-mined land last summer, as a demonstration of what can be done if you're really committed to rehabilitation.

Blair also spoke about the importance of not being one-dimensional when it comes to the environment.  It's not just about planting a few trees and thinking you've done your bit.  Restoring the land to its natural conditions - whether that's trees, bushes, grassland or something else - is more important, and he really surprised me with how much time and thought he had given to this process.

Now it's all very well and good talking about this sort of stuff, but it's something quite different when you're actually there and see the processes happening for yourself.  You've got active mining happening in one area, a processing plant with huge piles of coal ready to be sent out, unmined land, rehabilitated land... it's quite amazing thinking about how the stages all relate to each other, and even just getting it straight in your mind that they're all stages in the same process!

And speaking of huge...
The scale of this has to be seen to be appreciated.  This was the first time I'd ever been to a mine site before, so even Wilkie Creek (not a large mine, in the grand scheme of things) impressed me.  You can look at pictures all you want but there's something about standing at the edge of a viewing platform and seeing the huge stretches of coal before you.  It's like watching a model train set - very much so, actually, because the tiny/huge (depending on your perspective!) trucks appear like clockwork and disappear again behind piles of rocks.  It was interesting trying to identify all the different types of machinery on the site - putting a... face? to the list of equipment names from MINE2105 last semester...

drillin's facebook page has some more pictures here, from both sites.

The Origin visit was a bit more brief, but it was still enough for a very informative tour of the power station itself, as well as a bit of a briefing on the operation of the plant.  I don't study electrical engineering, but our guide aimed his talk really well and I was able to get a really good overview of not only how the power station operated, but also where it fit in on the energy supply track - from CSG fields in SW Qld to the light switches in someone's house.  Brought back memories of high school physics lessons - with a slight seasoning of Charlie and the Chocolate Factory :)

And finally - home.  But not before a surprisingly interesting drive back from the Darling Downs to Brisbane.  I'm not normally one for staring out the window watching trees go by, but on this particular trip it was absolutely fascinating watching the transition from out in the bush in the middle of nowhere, to regional towns like Dalby, to farms, to forests and mountains, to Toowoomba, to darkening highway, and finally to the bright lights of the city at night as we pulled into Brisbane.  Just makes you realise how much variety there actually is in Australia, if that was just a couple hours' drive from here to Dalby!

So thanks Joanna and QRC for organising that trip - it was a great day out and I really enjoyed it.  And I think I looked great in my Lowes shirt :)