Bauhaus

Daily journal
2020-01-25 20:12:24 (UTC)

First year of university

[Written Wednesday, 1 January 2020, 20:17]

An early [-er than yesterday] entry today. Cause I found myself almost falling asleep while watching a video earlier.
Not sure why. Maybe a longer night of sleep will help.

So I went to a uni a few hours' drive from home, studied B.Com accounting.
Only found out too late it wasn’t an accredited degree and I would have to do a bridging course afterwords. [I get into this in more detail in a later entry]

Anyway, my first year I was in the hostel.
It was a big adaptation for me. First time out of the house. First time sharing a room with someone. Being forced to basically become a social person for that first year. Going through all the first year initiation crap.
Had to become social because us first years were forced to attend and support all events related to the hostel. Like any time any sports team from our hostel played a game we had to be there. Had to attend a number of dances and culture events.
They also started the year with a major thing, a float building competition, that was just the worst thing. I remember one day we worked from 8 in the morning until 11 at night and had to get back to working on the float at like 3 the next morning or something silly like that. We also had to go around the city and sell these magazines to raise money.
Aside from the float building thing, it wasn’t too bad, looking back, but I definitely would not want to go through it again. Had to pretty much just grit my teeth and accept that the time during these events does not belong to me.

I wouldn’t really say I made friends in the hostel. Not proper friends you would want to hang out with anyway. I became friendly with most people, sure. But just enough to keep peace and avoid generating any drama or tension. My goal was basically to be as unnoticeable and unremarkable to the people in the hostel as possible. People would smile and say hi if they saw me, but otherwise would not have any further thoughts about me.

I did have three friends from classes though. Two were doing the same course as me (Ray and Sieg), and the third was actually just studying B.com general and just so happened to share a most of my first year subjects (Belinda).
Perhaps not surprisingly, between those three I became the best friends with the girl, Belinda, in my first year.
I believe it was actually like on my first day, in one of my classes I ended up sitting next to her since we both preferred seats near the front.
We got talking, we sat next to each other in the other classes we had together, we became friendly, we became friends, we helped each other out with homework.
Belinda’s mom actually owned one of the restaurants on campus. It was a formal restaurant aimed more at the staff than the students. We would often go sit at one of the tables there between or after classes to do homework together. It was nice, I do miss those times.
It’s not especially relevant, but I feel I should mention Belinda was a bit older than me, by like 5 years or so I think.

Ray and Sieg I became friends with more out of necessity than anything else. They usually sat one or two rows behind me and Belinda and were a bit more social than either of us, not that that’s really saying much.
Anyway, I became friends with them more or less when we got our first group assignment. Me and Belinda fell in with them to do the assignment together. I liked Ray, he seemed a lot like me, and Sieg wasn’t too bad. Though if I’m honest, if Ray hadn’t already been good friends with Sieg, I probably never would’ve interacted with Sieg. He’s not a bad guy or anything, he was just more social and care-free in a way that would sometimes grate a bit on me.
After that group project I would keep in contact with them. Not very much contact, pretty much I would just go out of my way to greet them, and I would hang out with them if they happened to be around and Belinda wasn’t and I didn’t want to be the weird guy standing alone.

As far as actual academics goes, my first year made me very complacent. Almost all of it was revision from the last year or two of highschool. I did pretty much all assignments either the day before it was due or on the due date if at all possible. Had a similar thing going for tests, in that I would literally only start making study notes and then studying them either the day before the test or on the day of the test if the test was only sometime in the afternoon.
To be fair, I did go to all the classes and genuinely paid attention to the lectures. Plus there were the regular homework/ class discussion sessions with Belinda. Though honestly and obviously I did those more because I wanted to spend time with Belinda than because I wanted to spend time on study-work.
I still passed all of my subjects well [Meaning I usually got above 60%. That's generally my standard for doing well in academics. Getting below 60 makes it look like you just scraped by. Above 70 is nice, but takes more effort than I think its really worth. Above 80 is really just showing off]. I don’t at all regret my study approach for that year, or the similar approach I took for each of the three years I had at that uni.




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