Saturday, December 18, 2010

Semester 2 overview

Semester 2 was much harder than the 1st. Harder, longer studying hours, more subjects, tougher assignments... let's end that by saying semester 2 was really stressful. I took 5 subjects (2 compulsory, 2 electives, and 1 lan) during semester 2: Advanced English, Critical Thinking Skills, Principles of Accounting, Economics Principles and Malaysian Studies.

Just by comparing the words "intermediate" and "advanced", Advanced English was expected to be more difficult than Intermediate English. No surprises here. Grammar was even more important and focused than before. The worst thing about Advanced English was probably (or definitely) the term/research paper. Basically, students must write a research paper consisting of 2000 words with citation, references. Paraphrasing is required as no plagiarizing is allowed. With many rules and regulation to do a good paper, it brought a lot of suffering. Besides that, it comprises 25% of the total marks in Advanced English. Adding the 10% of presentation needed to be done on the topic of each respective research paper, they take up a whopping 35% out of 100% of the subject! Kinda makes the research paper more important when it consists of so many marks.

How about the lecturer? It's easy to describe her. When she is in a good mood (usually during the early classes), the class will be fun and cheerful. When she is in a bad mood (usually during the late classes), it's GG!! She is actually quite nice with her friendly smile and lessons will go on smoothly. Too bad she has a darker side. She blasted the class quite a number of times, including 1 time when she made a super offensive remark: saying that a dog wouldn't even understand our work. WTH man?! So freaking offensive. At least she did apologize at one of the classes near the end of the semester. After all, this was her first time teaching Advanced English.


Critical Thinking Skills was the 2nd compulsory subject for all semester 2 students. Compared to Study Skills, I actually think that this subject is much more useful as it relates more to daily life. Unfortunately, CTS is still a tough subject with a lot to memorize while understanding it.

The lecturer was decent. Though the lectures may sometimes be quite boring, he does give good and clear examples, and is sometimes quite funny.


Accounting was a hard and boring subject for me. It is not really related to Maths. It should be more accurate to say that it is more related to numbers. There isn't much calculation. It's the terms and format that makes doing accounting hard. Another subject with plenty of memorizing. The good thing about this subject is NO assignments or presentations at all. :DDD

Economics Principles covered the basics of Microeconomics and Macroeconomics. Micro was easier than Macro. Anyway, I preferred this subject to Accounting. For this subject, more understanding is needed than memorizing. Other than that, we must relate most of the things that we learnt in the previous topic to the next topic.

The lecturer was quite fun. Her teaching is good and she gives clear examples, though she sometimes teaches too fast. She sometimes tells some stories too. Haha. Every week, her laptop wallpaper will have a different picture of her baby girl. We had really fun time during the class party where we saw her really let her hair down.


Malaysian Studies... the new Sejarah. 1 word. Boring. I really hate Sejarah and this is no better than it. Well maybe except the fact that it is in English. The group assignments were hard too. The first 1 required us to do a video. The second was to talk about a Malaysian movie (Gadoh) that we saw during one of the class. Last one was to visit a place and to make a scrap book about our experience. Haiz it's sad that we got quite low marks for all. I had to work harder for the final exam to aim for a pass.

A very tough semester for me indeed.

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