I suppose that coursework isn't an unexpected post title when it comes to the blog of a student, but coursework is running my life these days. A month or so ago I got set three pieces of coursework each with a deadline a week apart.
The first of these was a presentation. I hate presentations with a vengeance. I'm not good at talking in front of people, less so a lecture room full of 100+ people. I get nervous, my palms sweat, my cheeks go bright red and my words trip over one another on their way out of my mouth. I actually have volume issues, friends of mine have been known to have trouble hearing me while sitting inches away from me, and in most of my regular social groups people have either learnt to lip read or there's a designated interpreter. I'm actually incapable of ordering my own drinks on a night out, I do tend to pay for them though, and my boyfriend is overfond of the phrase "You're indoors dear, you need to use your outdoor voice."
So although this one required the least work I spent an understandable week and a half fretting my socks off over it. To say I breathed a sigh of relief when it was finished is a very big understatement!
I spent the next week working on a piece of coursework for my Portfolio Risk Management module. As a brief overview this is a module where we set up a fictional portfolio of around 10 assets and monitor them and perform some basic analysis on them. It's actually kind of fun, but very time consuming and more so when the checker you're supposed to fill in highlights an error in your most basic of calculations when there isn't any causing you to waste 4 hours trying to figure out what went wrong only to take it to a tutor and be told no your working's fine, it just means we'll look.
That was submitted by the deadline of 23:30 on sunday, it always makes me laugh that we get deadlines for this module on sundays. The joys and wonders of online submission, which is really the only way to do things when you need to use excel.
That brings me onto the deadline for this week. It's for a compulsory module called Mathematical Techniques 2, and involves 5 compulsory questions and a 6th optional one which has the great benefit of being able to add to your overall mark without the possibility of costing you any marks because we only got taught the content for it today giving us around 67 hours to complete it before submission. This is by far the hardest piece of coursework I've ever been given and I find myself wondering why on earth I didn't try to do a little more a little earlier.
So far I've spent hours on it and managed to complete only 1.a, 2.a, and 4.a, Although I have made a little headway with other areas. My friends and I have organised a massive coursework busting session for tomorrow where we hope to make headway! It's been getting me up early and to bed late, so you can see that coursework is running my life.
Wish me luck!
Rowen
