Netflix and Revision

Today we had an exam. The past few days have been spent preparing for it by doing endless tutorial questions, and watching too much Netflix. Needless to say, I genuinely believe that exam could have been attempted well without doing any revision at all.

This particular module is called “Electronics IV”, and focuses on active devices (transistors, diodes, SCRs) as well as basic power electronics (motors and generators). The exam was divided up into 3 sections and we needed to choose 3 questions from 6, but still do at least one from each section.

The first question I chose was fairly simple, and focused on the dependance on current gain for a Common Emitter BJT configuration without negative feedback. Next up was a question on Zener diodes, and its use in a linear power supply. I’ll admit this one got me sweating for a few minutes as it wasn’t as straightforward as it initially looked, but I got there eventually.

Finally, the “power electronics” section featured for the most part content we learnt in the first semester in the first year. Now I don’t want to complain too much, but at the back of the exam booklet was a 2 page spread covered in pointless equations that for the past few days Marta and myself have been trying to memorise due to our own ignorance, which is I suppose is our own fault. These were all dedicated purely to this section of the exam, and the entire question didn’t require anything more than Ohm’s Law. Well it’s not all bad I guess. If the mood strikes me and I want to calculate the flux linkage in a transformer I can … for probably the next 5 hours. Which is really my point.

I will be very honest now. I have skipped a lot of lectures this semester and yet I managed to get through the exam in half the time allocated to us. I even checked my numerical answers when I got home with a simulator, and luckily it looks like I was correct. For this semester alone, I have spent £4500 of a loan I will need to repay for the next 30 years after I finish University on lecturers and learning material designed to be taught over 11 weeks, and yet I absorbed 90% of the course in the 5 days before the exam.

Before you get the wrong idea, I’m not particularly intelligent, although others will dispute this. They are wrong though – I have had to work very hard to get where I am now. It’s just the material covered this semester has been so very easy. I was able to do most of this content 3 or 4 years ago, because the information is available for free online and is much better explained. The lectures I did attend spent 10 minutes talking vaguely about the subject in general while lightly skimming over the more challenging aspects, then doing 40 minutes of tutorial questions on the board. It’s not like we get a lot of those. I’d rather do them in my own time than be told the answer before being able to look at it properly.

This is why I thought my time could be better spent staying at home programming our game, which I haven’t actually done a lot of recently. We were going to do some work on it after the exam today which was initially scheduled for 9:00am, but unfortunately they pushed it back to 3:30pm. The entire day has been a blur of stress, tension headaches and explosive bowel movements. Oh, and getting whacked in the right bollock by Marta accidentally in the Co-op. But that’s a different story.

We have one more exam in 6 days, and then it’ll all be over. Then all I need to do is move house; get to Spain and back; take some more driving lessons; start working at my placement; take my driving test and live with 4 Spanish girls for a fortnight. Sound good?

-Matt

 

Last Night, Good Night

Last night I don’t think either of us slept very well. Because of my incompetence at making gifs for the last blog, we also went to bed quite late. The combination of these factors has led to a less than productive day today.

After dragging myself out of bed, I went downstairs and made breakfast. I have to say the microwaved porridge that I made this morning was outstanding. After breakfast and showering, we set about doing some revision for next weeks exam. By which I mean I played table piano, and Marta went on Twitter.

The next exam is actually almost relevant to the degree we’re studying. It’s called Electronics IV, and on the surface there’s nothing particularly difficult about the material. In fact, one third of it is stuff we’ve done in other modules several times, and most of the other stuff we’ve had to learn independently for lab sessions. Doing tutorial questions on it, however, has been challenging. I’ve been having to look at the answers to get information necessary to answer the questions, as it wasn’t given in the questions initially. As usual, the lecture material is basically useless, as were the lectures for that matter.This worries me, because if the exam is like that I’m stuffed. So not the best day in that respect.

As well as the revision, we received an email from the estate agents today. They wanted us to sign off a 21 page contract for the apartment we’re moving to in 12 days. Which was fun.

On the bright side, Miku RPG development is steadily progressing. Yesterday I managed to get multiple maps loaded, and switched between them in the map editor. We also got a little piggy walking around which was very exciting. After tweaking a few bits, and getting rid of some bugs, I’ll be starting work on portals – that is, the ability for the player to be transported to a different location on a different map. This probably sounds outlandish, but will primarily allow the player to walk through doors into buildings. So it’s not actually that exciting, but still very necessary.

And on that note, I think I’m going to sleep for a thousand years. Good night.

-Matt