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Friday, 11 July 2008

the day most students dread/look forward to (whichever way you look at it) came creeping slowly and it was over in a matter of hours. four years of once-a-year exams, predicting questions that are going to come out, and cold wind has been well worth it. it has. and it sort of feels empty now.

Thursday, 19 June 2008

ptyalism, sialorrhoea, salivating, drooling. metallic. check. high tops.check. pointy toes. check. hearts it. Shoes by Hummel.

Friday, 13 June 2008

The University of Newcastle-Upon-Tyne's graduation ball single-fingeredly trumped Sunderland's graduation ball. a better comparison would be goliath vs a church mouse! i was working for both occasions, sunderland's was at the stadium of light while newcastle's was at the federation brewery (where our school of pharmacy had its annual ball in 2007) attendance-wise, there were only 19 tables for sunderland's grad ball and not all of them were full tables of ten while newcastle had about 90-ish tables! for newcastle's grad ball they had Just Jack as their headlining act (Northumbria has Sugababes!) while sunderland only had some Z-list tribute act. and for me, the coolest feature of the ball was that newcastle had a playground/amusement ground in the void space next to the carparks! i tried to sneakily take pictures of the playground through the windows from where we were waiting to serve.

oh sunderland, oh sunderland, i doubt that a 75million pound facelift would ever give the university the kind of edge that newcastle or northumbria have.

also, according to the girls, there were a lot of dresses from Warehouse! and we spotted nearly ten girls wearing the same dress!! i tried to find it online but cannot seem to locate it. it was an electric blue halter dress. it was a right laugh spotting so many same dresses!

Wednesday, 11 June 2008

Since exams have finished, trashy television shows that are availableonline to watch have been on my plat-du-jour. Shipwrecked, which I only came to know of last summer because my pre-reg friend told me when we were on a ward that one of the patients in that gastro ward used to be on Shipwrecked years ago (so much for patient confidentiality!) and I scurried round to the bay to catch a glimpse of the pseudo-celebrity. well, anyways, this year I have started watching Shipwrecked where youngones from the UK are stranded on islands in the Pacific and newcomers each week have to choose which tribe and island to live on. the twist this year is that once the newcomers select the tribe/island the tribe then decides who amongst the two gets selected to join the tribe. now, last weeks tribe member selection was particularly interesting because the two newcomers were guys, one is straight and the other is flamboyantly-campy-gay. both of them chose the Tiger island, which to me has a very laddish sort of mentality to the tribe. thus, when selection of newcomers were made, the tribe said that they needed to add a different dimension to the tribe and adding a different dimension to the tribe will help win over more newcomers as the game proceeds. therefore, they chose the gay guy to join their tribe and not another Essex lad (there are already two essex lads on that tribe). what struck me most was they chose the gay guy just for the sake of making it seem like they are a diversified group who are tolerant and open-minded. but from the show, it did seem like the gay guy did enjoy being on that island. but then again, this is at the end of the day, a game show where money is to be won. but in all honesty, i think that the gay guy would not have been chosen if it was not for the stakes that are at risk.

Tuesday, 10 June 2008

I was thinking and planning on gifts to get for my personal tutor and project supervisor and ended up with the most generic combination, a thank you card with chocolates. When I was a baby, I must have banged my head and lost all creative sensories as I dont have a creative bone in me! Planned a good day to go back to uni because all of them were mostly in their offices and I had a good chat with them. Initially I wanted to ask my project tutor how I had fared in my project thesis after my viva but thought to leave it until after exams in case if I did poorly on my writeup it will demoralised me. So when I asked her today on how I had done, it was a positive response although there were some errors towards the end bit of it. I pressed and pressed and pressed and tried to squeeze for some indication of how I actually did and I found out that I might be leaning towards the upper percentile amongst those who did a pharmaceutics project. I was stunned. My tutor also said that my viva was good and I was also suprised because the second examiner, Dr C, had a whole long list of questions to ask me whereas I have heard from the other/previous students who had him as a second examiner that he normally doesn't ask anything in the viva. So, I was shocked when I saw his list of questions for me. But I seemed to have defended my project really well! Oh, and all of our actual marks are online and the tutors can check them but they cannot reveal anything to us due to confidentiality reasons. dang. And vivas for 'borderline cases' as termed by our programme leader extends to all First Class students, borderline middle percentile and lower percentile group. I thought only the borderline people get called for vivas but did not expect the First Class students to get called in too, guess they want to make sure that they are really eligible for being the top 1/6 th of the cohort.