mylifeonthenet.com

By 12pm on Wednesday–a nine month odyssey will be over.  What you say?  My second year at university.

So, it is time for a recap on how I feel it’s went.  Overall, I’ve learned a few things–but I think I’ve let myself down.

The word that’s hit me with the past year is ‘potential‘.  Knowing that I could have achieved so much, why did I just waste my time?  I don’t mean in just the educational front, but the social front too.

Education

I’ve had some excellent times to strive for something awesome this year.  I’ve been given projects that have tested my knowledge in some frameworks and I’ve enjoyed going further than I knew and being forced to learn new things.  But I felt that this year has been a little bad in it’s structure, and I came out of it disliking most of the design staff at Abertay since they didn’t structure their work around our course.  When they did seemingly have a plan for us, simple questions from other course-mates left them dumbfounded (such as “what’s rendering?” when talking about video editing).

Some things just didn’t make sense.  A module on Law was included, which from what I heard was interesting–but turned out to be 95% irrelevant.  When I’m doing a Web Design & Development course, I don’t expect to need to learn how many seats are in the European parliament.  Just my two cents.

Other courses were difficult to understand and the course material hard to follow.  One was a module called Designing Interfaces, which was my worst scoring module of the year.  And by worst, I mean it.  While I was good at all other subjects, I almost failed this one.  That’s a big no-no for me, who strives to do well in what I do.  One of the development modules was bad as well, giving us files with redundant code that hasn’t been used in XHTML in over 5 years (for a second I thought the <marquee> was going to rear it’s ugly head).

Personal/Professional Side

While it helped not having a TV this year, I still didn’t get many side projects done.  It’s taken a long time for me to get motivated to do anything.  I could blame this on thoughts back home towards my mother, or just plain laziness… but I feel I could have done so much with my free time.  I’ve had ideas that didn’t pan out, blogs I’ve wanted to start, and I never get around to them.

After Corinne went back to the States that changed though.  I got out of ‘slob‘ mode and started being productive.  I started building websites that were long overdue but other things, like this blog, got put to the side.  I’m going to have to find a way to be productive while still keeping true to the things I love doing.

Social Side

If you don’t remember, most of the people at my current residence are French.  When they get back from classes, the promptly proceed to speak French to other French people, or they quickly rush back to their rooms in search of solitude.  I, a perfectly well-mannered Scotsman, capable of only speaking English (I forgot most of my French about a week after my final exam) cannot fathom the language spoken by these people.  Although they are capable of speaking in my tongue, they often decide not to, and keep themselves in their little French lives.  Therefore, I have lead a quiet life of isolation most of the time I have lived here.

That started to change after Corinne left too.  I pushed myself to meet people (not the French though, they stand against reasonable chatter and socialisation) I should have gotten to know ages ago.  I even played football.

Where do we go from here?

I’ve tried my best to change and manage my life after all these changes have hit me.  They’ll keep hitting me, but now I’m prepared.  I’m able to manage my projects–both educational and personal–a lot better.  I’m no longer afraid to meet new people and go to events where I’d usually feel uncomfortable.  I’m starting to enjoy it.  I just need to get better at it.