Survival kit

These are essential items in my survival kit for the past few exams! Rather than Goldfish, I found Chickadees from Target, cheaper, tasty but salty! Cute tiny pretzels make good snacks too, and the all important snack bar - Odwalla is my favorite brand! Just don't ask me about my weight, it has been steadily climbing and I foresee winter will not be at all helpful... :( See my cute calculator too? It has been with me for ages, with several frog stickers as well as one pretty angel to watch over me as I fumble with  biochemistry equations and struggle with GHK equations.

To answer aki-chan's question in  previous post, the exams are purely written, and one full day from 8.30am to 5pm is assigned for this task. We can leave any time to eat or stretch or if one is really tired, even to sleep in the student lounge! Sometimes a group of us will be eating our sandwiches outside the lecture hall and discussing how sad the weekend was cramming for the exam. Often times it feels strange, unlike all exams back home where there is silence was deafening and you had raise your hands to ask questions or get more booklets. The longest I have stayed was until 4pm, which is too long in my opinion. By then I am brain dead and often times I lose Monday as a result of these exams. As the questions are mainly technique based to stimulate creativity in designing experiments rather than regurgitation of textbook material, you will see all of us deep in thought. Or at least attempt to answer it to our best ability. When all else fails, give a really bad review on post exam surveys, make lots of complaints, and sometimes the questions will be removed, bringing up everyone's scores! :) Seriously, that has never happened before in Sg, at least not to me. One other thing that stood out was that everyone uses the pencil and not write in ink for the exams. It makes sense really, so you can erase that one page when you realise that you missed one important line in the question!

I would certainly say going to classes here is a different experience from back in Sg. People ask tons of questions, argue with lecturers, definitely so much more expressive. Content wise, it is akin to taking 4 years worth of undergraduate and cramming it all into a two-hour lecture. Isn't that fun? The other day, there was a drinking game during one of our lectures, with a facebook invite no less. This particular lady lecturer is really passionate about her work on a particular eukaryote, often pacing the room and speaking animately about the subject. Each time she said a certain word, some people in class drank hard liquor which they concealed in their water bottles. It was a real surprise that no one was drunk at the end of that lecture, at 11am! Tsk-tsk

Plus tomorrow is Wednesday, or Waffles Wednesday to  be more precise! :D Free hot waffles to chase away the mid-week blues - what is not to love? Guess I better go sleep now, the lecturer promised free donuts tomorrow too, it looks like I am set for lunch then! Spoken like a poor grad student yah?