Goodbye, Foundation

Yet another post after a long silence. This time, the silence is 2 months long. Those days where I can keep my blog updated at least once a week seem unaccomplishable looking back from now. Simply put, I've been busy with so many things that I've neglected my blog.

With a bit of luck, this blog could be up and running at full steam once again since I'm now on a 4-month long summer break. Yes, 4-months long! Despite celebrating the fact that I'll be free for 4 long months, an unexplainable feeling of sadness has crept over me, knowing that I'll be progressing to another stage of my life, that is from Foundation to Undergraduate.


Time Flies

Time flies like and arrow, always in the forward direction, never backwards. I could still remember as vivid as yesterday the time when I was exploring and getting to know people around the campus of the University of Nottingham. Sometimes I feel one year is too short to fully familiarise ourselves with the environment here. There are still many people here who had been in the same class as me whom I do not know. Even in my last semester, I finally got to know the names of some of the people I've met once too many. At times, this short time period may fail to create strong friendship bonds, especially with the summer break where fellow course-mates are separated by distance for 4 long months.


Foundation Life

Life in Foundation is a major change from secondary school life. Learning to live without parents, spending more time with friends instead of family, greater freedom... I would say I'm pretty much used to this life already, although I find myself lazy and preferring to rely on parents when I'm back home. Meeting friends after class has never been easier with friends living within metres of each other. Weekends are usually spent going out or having the occasional DotA party.


Thoughts on Studies

Much of the time spent in Foundation is about studies, assignments and studies. The lecturers were OK, each with their own distinctive style of teaching. When it comes to marking tests and exams, their grading criteria can range from extremely lenient to awfully picky. On one occasion, a lecturer gave me extra marks for my Maths quiz when I went to see him, even though I was careless when answering the question. Yet another lecturer deducted points for another quiz simply because my answers were not presented in one line. "Your answers are scattered everywhere," she said (or something to that effect; I forgot the exact words). "I did underline the answers though...," was my reply. No point arguing.

Speaking about Maths, the Maths modules are the ones I love to hate. Firstly, I've always enjoyed a love-hate relationship with Maths - love because it is an essential part of Physics and Engineering and hate when things get too complicated. Come on, do we really have to differentiate an expression with powers here and there and then simplify them? I bet a real-life engineer wouldn't encounter such an expression to differentiate while doing his job; even if he does, there's such a thing called a computer that will gladly churn out the answer in a mere milliseconds with near 100% accuracy (taking into account the fact that computers can have bugs too). Can't risk a human error here.

Overall, I had learnt quite a lot (and forgotten most of them too) during my Foundation course. But sometimes I think a blending of social science subjects like economics into the course would be useful...


To all my Nottingham Foundation friends, we shall meet again as fellow undergraduates in September.


UPDATE: A section of this post has been deleted due to reasons I would not discuss here.