Midterms and Finals

I find midterm exams much more difficult to handle than the Finals. For one thing other classes don't stop for the midterm and include what was taught in the last class, maybe the class before. That is brutal. If you have to go back and do things you could have done weeks earlier, then you won't have nearly enough time. Even with as much as possible already done, you still fall behind in your other classes. Or when you have two midterms on the same day, you obviously will study for both, but closer to the date you have to make a decision. If you try to study both equally, you either just won’t do it, or you won't retain anything for either one. So you learn that you have to focus on one that you will study more for. The first midterms I did were the hardest, because I hadn't learned to figure out what the prof really wanted on the exam. I can do that better now, but it still is the hardest thing in most of my courses.

Finals were much less frightening than I'd expected in September. At least for finals, you can focus on them because your classes are over. The finals are based on what you have learned throughout the term, you have already studied half the stuff for midterms, and only half is new.

The worst problem with finals were the bonehead profs who were so slow throughout the term and then went zipped through the material like lightning during the last few classes. One told us, as he raced through the classes, what we had to know for the final and what we didn’t have to know, which was great. But another just said, “know everything” and that wasn’t so great. Gee, thanks for narrowing it down! In another class, the exam was full of stuff that the prof had barely even talked about in class. If I hadn’t been taking two other courses where that material was covered, I wouldn’t even have know what the questions were about. You never know what you are going to learn in one class that will help you in another.

Letting Friends Pick Your Major

The worst mistake I made was near the end of the first year, when we had to decide what to specialize in for the rest of our time in University. First year, most people do almost the same set of introductory courses, whether they're going into the Sciences or into the Arts or the Humanities. It's in the second year that you really set your direction, and that's where I went horribly wrong.

It was close to the end of term, and Finals were coming on. All through the year, I had been studying with a group of friends I'd made in September. We'd all been doing well, and getting good marks. We had various ways of studying together: everyone would review some different parts of the work, and then write questions on it or set problems for the others to do. We found studying together made us much better at deciding what was most important and therefore most likely to be on the exam -- after Midterms in November and March, and a set of Finals in December, we'd already had plenty of practice. We were much better at doing it together than any of us would be by ourselves. We all trusted each other and liked each other, and working together like this made working for the Finals so much more interesting and less stressful. Our minds were full of all this, and signing up for the following year didn't seem much more than an annoying distraction.

Actually, for the others, there wasn't all that much of a decision to be made. Some had long ago decided on Math, Physics, and computers. Others were more into Biology because that was where their main interest had always been. But me: I'd never really known. With all that was going on that first year, I never seemed to get the chance to think about it much, or discuss it with an academic counsellor or anyone else. So it was natural for me to just go along with the flow, and sign up for the same things that my friends did.

Second year was a lot more specialized. The assumption was that everyone's future would be in the labs or in the subjects that the various Profs were teaching. It didn't take me more than a couple of weeks to realize that this was not what I want to do with the rest of my life. Now I remembered one of the things that had made the previous year so enjoyable. We always ended up knowing all the same things, and we all got good marks, but in the less sciency courses, like psych, I was the one who took the lead in our studies together. But in the ones like Chem and Math, it was always someone else, and I was a follower. Odd that I hadn't really ever thought about that before; instead of thinking about anything like that, it was easier just to go with the flow and enjoy working together.

I went to see if I could change my program, but it was already beyond the deadline. As well, all the courses I wanted were full. So I was stuck with the ones I was doing. Even though most of us in last year's group were still working together on most things, the magic had really gone out of it for me. Of course, the others saw that, especially because now I was always a follower, never the leader. I didn't feel I was pulling my weight any more. I wasn't enjoying the work itself either. Everything seemed uphill, and extremely boring. As a result, my marks have already gone down a bit, and it will be a major task for me to keep them at least respectable at Christmas.

Now, in November of my second year, I absolutely wish that I'd thought about some of these things before. Underneath, I'd known all these things all along. But I'd avoided thinking about them because it was hard and unpleasant: much easier just to avoid it and leave things as they had been. I've looked into changing some courses next semester; some things I can, others I can't. The counsellor pointed out to me that in my new program, although my courses would all count, I'd have to do at least one extra one to fulfill all the specialist requirements for my new Major.

I'm sure I'll be able to work it out, but I'm not sure how. In the meantime, I'm stuck with a whole bunch of classes that are useless to me, and boring too. At least I can see my way ahead now, though. But it would have been a lot better if I'd thought about it earlier.

Fraternities Are Worth it.

I’ve had the opportunity to read the frat-trashing story and I disagree completely. The problem is that you hear all these stories about only the negative things that happen at a small proportion of existing fraternities. It makes me angry.

You hear about irresponsible and harmful hazing rituals yet many former and current pledges will tell you that even though the hazing was tough, they appreciated the close relationships that they formed because of it. They say that they wouldn’t have bonded as well as they did had they not gone through these tough rituals together. Some say it’s like in the military. But I bet you none of them like to hear of hazing that gets out of hand.

You hear about parties where booze and drugs are everywhere but you show me a dorm of first years where you won’t find a bunch of drunk kids ‘bumping around to bad music’ whose goal is to get wasted. C’mon. These issues are not unique to frats. It’s not the frats that are at fault -- it’s the guys who act like idiots and do dumb, irresponsible and inconsiderate things. Those guys are always going to be around regardless of whether frats exist or not. Hazing, drugs and alcohol abuse exist in sports teams, in clubs, and in many organizations. So hey, why don’t we ban them all? And we’ll get rid of dorms too while we are at it.

Frats can do many good things. They collect money for charities. They organize various community service projects. They provide leadership experiences; look up all the great leaders who were members of frats during their college days.

Frats provide a unique experience for young women and men seeking fellowship and support. They provide a family away from your family back home. In my frat, it doesn’t matter what ethnic or sexual orientation you are – we treat each other with respect and we offer each other our friendship.

The stories you hear about are tragic. But they are isolated occurrences and not the norm. The positive outweighs the negative.

I am glad I chose to be a part of my fraternity.

I Don't Like Frats!

My experience with fraternities has been very negative. In my first year, I wanted to see what frat parties were like so I went to a lot of them. They were lame but I kept hoping they would get better. They didn't. Just a bunch of drunk college kids bumping around in a crowded basement to really incredibly bad, loud music. It seemed that everyone’s goal at these parties was to get as drunk as they possibly could. Now I like to have fun but this just wasn’t my scene.

At this University, frats are big; students find it exciting to be a member because there are lots of other frats to compete with which many say can be fun. But at other universities, frats can be a dying culture. My best friend attends one of these universities and says there is no competition and their frat parties are boring, maybe five people sitting in the basement in their togas. What is it about frat parties and basements anyways?

Belonging to a frat is undesirable to me because it is just not my scene. It is undesirable to my friend because there is just nothing to do.

Not all fraternities are the same. Each one has a little bit of a different reputation and people tend to gravitate toward the one that suits them. Some are decent and more social, some are seedy and you wouldn’t ever go to parties there. In my sister’s freshman year here, she was given an introduction she never forgot. She was told which frats to avoid and why: over there is the date rape frat, that one is for coke-heads, and so on. People learn very quickly what happens where. And frats do tend to be labeled because each of them tends to have a specific reputation associated with it.

The process of joining a frat is supposed to be secret. Many don’t help themselves by what they do to their pledges ranging from pouring human waste or boiling water on them to promoting underage and binge drinking and drugs. Some even get shut down because of their hazing. Just last year, one frat was closed because of coke use in the hazing process. The University gave other reasons, but really, it was the coke that made them do it.

I have often found frat members irresponsible and not considerate of others. Some of these frat houses are quite nice yet you often see garbage lying around outside and hear of them getting trashed inside quite frequently. And during our finals, we often were forced to study late into the night but it was really hard to focus because some of the frats would blare their music very loud, despite us asking them many times to turn it down. They would turn it down for a little while, then they’d turn it back up.

I believe that you can have fun and party without seeking out a reputation such as this. It’s a lifestyle choice. In our second year, we came up with an alternative when we had our own house. We began to host our own parties and we were careful to keep the numbers low and the music level reasonable and keep an eye on the drinking. We even had activities. We had something called board games and booze, or we would do things like play checkers and monopoly and scrabble. And then after people had a few drinks, we would bring out the twister. I said we kept an eye on the drinking but I didn’t say that we didn’t do it at all.

Maybe others have had positive experiences with respect to fraternities. But I am glad I chose not to be a part of it. To each his own, I guess.

No One Could Have Prepared Me; I Had to Go Through it Myself

Coming into university, I had many different views on what it was going to be like. People tried to tell me: family, friends and even my older siblings shared their stories and their experiences. Never once did I think to myself that my experience would be any different than theirs.

When I got here, though, it was nothing at all like I expected. After my first day of classes, my whole view changed. It was almost as if I hadn’t heard any of those stories.

I found it really intimidating and overwhelming to make the transition from high school. In high school, I knew what teachers wanted because they laid everything out for us. In university, nothing is laid out, so you either don't know what the prof wants or once you finally figure it out, you get confused because another prof teaching the exact same thing to another section will want something different. And then you go to another class next term and the prof teaches and wants assignments done in a completely different style. Nothing seems the same, so you have no idea what to expect any more. If you don’t figure out what the prof wants soon enough, it would be a severe handicap and would make it almost impossible to do well in the course.

For one thing, there's just so much more. It's not so much that the work is hard, just that most of it is new, it goes so much faster, and there's such a lot more material you have to know about. What would take you a month in high school would take less than a week here. There's never a sense that you've finished. It just comes at you and keeps coming. When you take a break, you tend to feel guilty because there's always something you could be doing.

When I studied in high school, I would start making study notes a couple of weeks before the exam. But here, there's not time do that. You have to make your study notes as soon after your lecture as you can to get them out of the way. It's easier to make the condensed notes right away, because you can remember what went on in the class itself. Also, you can incorporate things from the textbook that seem important; again easier if the material is fresher in your mind.

You have to learn the various meanings of the word 'read'. Sometimes it means that you have to know pretty well every word so it might take you a whole evening to read fifty pages. Other times, it couldn't possibly mean that because there is just too much of it there. So you have to be selective and use some street smarts to decide what you actually need to pay attention to.

Sometimes if you are writing a paper, you can just leaf through the book, find a few parts of it that interest you, and then use those in the paper. If you do this, you might be able to 'read' the book in less than an hour. Other times, you can go even further. You can go through the book, find maybe four sentences that are relevant to what you are doing, and put them into a paper or a seminar contribution. The prof recognizes where they come from and concludes that you have read the book. Well, in a way I guess you have. But it is not the same as spending a whole evening on fifty pages. But you have to somehow know what the prof expects and often he does not tell you what he expects. And I think more than any of us know, even he does not know what he expects.

It took a while, not until after the first set of midterms, for me to get used to everything and to know how best to do the work. At that point, even though each class was different, I got a pretty good idea of what the profs wanted and what I needed to know -- what was expected, what was important to do, and what not important. It was easier to study for exams and I felt a lot more confident about them. It's hard to describe how it happens; it takes a while, but you just seem to get to know how to handle things, and to be confident that you'll be right most of the time.

I don't think you can find out from anyone how to prepare yourself for what it's going to be like. It's something you have to experience for yourself. University is just like a movie: you can't take anyone else's word for how it will seem to you. You have to go yourself and see it and deal with it yourself.