January 14

My Day

Dear Diary! Today was the exam of my children. (Also known as the students which I TA’d.) There were 98 of them. One student was even caught cheating. This student was not in my room, so I didn’t see it happen. When they caught him, they wanted him to show his UNI-ID. He then claimed, that he didn’t have it. For obvious reasons, this was a lie. Since to enter the room, they all had to show their UNI-ID. He will now just get an “F” for this exam, so it’s not the worst for him (probably).

Once the exam was over, I went to buy lunch, and headed to the building where we do the corrections. I went into the cafeteria to eat lunch. In the cafeteria were the 2 PHD-students which were helping supervising the exam in my room. We talked a little bit, and then I realized, that it’s probably really hard to get into a PHD-program. One of them was from Costa-Rica, and the other one from Italy. (Obviously quite a travel for them every day [haha]) They also asked me, if I wanted to do a PHD. The answer is “probably not”. First it would be nice, if I get my/ a bachelors degree.

One funny situation was, when they asked me if I’m in a master’s program, to which I replied with “no”. Then the PHD-student from Italy squeaked [haha] for a quick moment. (She didn’t know, that I could be a TA, whilst still studying for the bachelors. In Italy where she studied, you need a bachelors to TA.)

After lunch, the other TA, the PHD student supervising “my” lecture and I headed to the correction room. We then (obviously) started with the corrections. We worked from 13:30 -> ~18:00. I did roughly 1.5/6 exercises on 1/3rd of the exams. Which means, I’ll probably be busy for the rest of the week with correcting exams… We also correct them twice, which also means double the work for every one of us :(.

Once I got home (at about quarter to seven), I ate some dinner, watched some Mentalist and YouTube. I saw an interesting video, of some bonsai-tree-guy. I forgot what he was called, but in this particular video, he took some old/un-cared for bonsai tree and then tried to freshen it up, so to speak. There are a lot of steps involved, and it also takes a really long time. For this video, it took him like 3 years to finish. Of course, you don’t have to make a crazy amount of changes to a tree, but still.
For example, one interesting part (which I didn’t know existed) was: He made a sketch of the tree stem, and then sketched a lot of ways of how the branches could be. Once he had his best configuration figured out, he took some wire, and bent the branches to fit his image (over the time of about 2 years). (But to be honest, I liked it some more, in the middle, than in the ending. It looked kinda fake to me…)
Once he was finished with the ordering of the branches, he oiled the tree up, which I thought was kinda weird for a still living tree, but hey – whatever grows your tree.

After this break, I went to the gym. Nothing special there, except, my father goes to the gym now, (at the same place as I go to) so I met him there. He also helped me quickly for the low row. That means, he held his fingers between my shoulder blades, so I could really focus on them.

After the gym I went home shower, watched some videos, and now I’m writing (to) you.

Cheat day results

Ah, I almost forgot. Since yesterday was my cheat-day (no studying), we are curious how I felt today. The answer is: Not really any different [haha]. It’s also super biased, since I usually study at home, but the exam corrections are in the rooms of the university. I’ll probably try it again soon, so we see how I’ll do then.

That’s it for today. I’ll see you tomorrow! Bye-Bye!