Mid-terms & Thoughts on Courses

A long night of revision (chatting about guys, life, and
Korea) awaits us....

It's currently the early hours of Monday 21st October, the beginning of mid-terms week.

A few weeks before now students have already started camping out at the study rooms and libraries, walking around those areas in pajamas, no longer caring about how they look - well some. Earlier last week I met up with my Korean KUBA buddy to hand some money over to pay for the KUBA Korea University varsity jackets, she turned up in her sleep wear outside GS25 haha! Turns out that she had loads of assignments to do, and one of them was due the next day so she was going to pull an all nighter. A common thing Koreans seem to do when it comes to assignments...

Also, yesterday night me, Louise and another friend from Vancouver decided to go out to study at TOM N TOMS - since it was open 24/7, with the added bonus of freshly made coffee and honey bread available. Unfortunately when we arrived - at 00:30-ish, the place was already packed with students studying for mid-terms. There were a few seats available scattered around, but we needed a table for 3. So we left, trying to find other places that were open 24/7 and good for studying.
In the end we couldn't find any - either they were closed or were closing soon at 1am or so, and instead bought 3 rounds of convenience store coffees, trekked back up the hill to the accommodation area and set camp in one of CJ International House's study rooms - L lived in CJ. Whilst spending an hour trying to find a place that would deliver us some midnight snacks (ok, a meal, we were looking for a meal, our dinner) on this Korean Delivery app, one of the security guards came in and told us that people who didn't live in CJ weren't allowed in the study room. Luckily he let me and Louise off this time round because we needed a place to group study...
To play it safe we ended up not bothering to order anything in fear that the security guy would see and scold us. We were planning to ordering McDonald's breakfast at 3.50am as well - when the breakfast menu began.

My Mid-terms & thoughts on courses

I have 2 exams on Tuesday - New Media and Consumer Behavious, 1 exam on Thursday - Beginner's Korea, and a take-home assignment due for next week on Tuesday 29th.

Strangely enough, I'm not at all anxious about them. Nor do I feel the absolute urgency to revise hardcore-ly for them. I feel quite...relaxed, yet worried that I am being so relaxed about it because usually I freak out over exams like I did for last semester. Perhaps it's because I haven't had mid-terms before, in England we only have exams at the end of the semester and coursework assignments in between. Plus, it feels like I haven't learnt anything vital yet. It still feels like I'm on holiday. 

Though, I do get the feeling that I learnt more in New Media, yet I have no idea how to apply what I've learnt so far to the exam. From the exam sample we got it looks dead easy, it's basically an extended version of what we normally do for the twice weekly assignemnts, only without a long reading to do before answering the question/writing a review, so I guess that makes it harder. But it all seems like common sense telecomm marketing/business to me.

Also, for Consumer Behaviour and Strategic Communications a majority of the questions will be in true or false format, and some will just require us to fill in the blanks or write a really short description of a concept. And that's it.
Having looked at my notes again today I noticed that there are definitely things that I have never learnt before, yet the notes were very vague. Not detailed. I based them off the powerpoint slides accompanied with what the teacher explained, yet the notes still doesn't seem to be quite informative and full. Perhaps I am too used to writing lots of potentially unecessary notes back in England hence why it feels like it's not enough. We were suggested to read stuff from the course textbook to supplement our notes, yet at the same time I feel like I need not to...

Media and Social Change's assignment appeared incredibly long and tedious at first, but in reality (I'm pretty much 1 essay question away from completion) it's pretty easy as long as you know how to waffle/bs. I ended up reading the relevant chapters to supplement my answer to each question, yet I found that I didn't really have to. The powerpoint presentation notes were enough since the questions were just asking about our thoughts on certain theories. It was almost like a reading response.

Beginner's Korean is the lesson that I feel that I have learnt the most from, yet at a painfully slow and unecessary pace. The stuff we are taught, as my Korean language exchange buddy describes it, is very textbook-like. For example, we are taught to say "is there bread?" and the answer is "yes, there is bread", clearly the second phrase in the response is unecessary in reality, yet we are still told to do it since it is a form of practicing our speaking skills and writing.
I got 18/20 on the quiz that we took 2 weeks ago, which does count into our final grade. So I'm pretty lax about revising for the upcoming exam on Thursday. My only problem really is spelling.