Happy April! April is my birthday month, and I am also excited that the month means that summer is getting closer. But, the reality of being a Wellesley student this month is that we are all currently swamped with work. I want to give an honest glimpse into my academics right now.
My statistics class is taking up most of my time this week. I have a midterm exam in this class next week and have an assignment due this week. Every couple weeks, we have assignments in this class; these are like mini-projects that we complete by coding in a statistical program called R. Since this is a 300-level class, the material is coding-intensive and fairly challenging. Thus, I regularly attend office and tutor hours. At Wellesley, many courses have tutors. Almost every class I have taken here at Wellesley has some sort of tutor attached to it. Tutors are students who have previously taken and succeeded in the course and host weekly drop-in hours for students to come and ask for help. I am very grateful for the amazing tutors here at Wellesley, they truly are lifesavers!
In my econometrics class, we also have a midterm next week and are starting to work on our final project. In this class, we do a group final project using the class work we have learned. My project group and I are examining the effect of immigrants on native-born American wages by analyzing large datasets.
This week, I have a midterm for my computer science (CS) class. This is the main introductory CS class at Wellesley, and I find that this class is very well taught and structured: there are revision and extension opportunities on our projects, quiz retakes, and professors and tutors hold multiple drop-in hours almost everyday. If you look at my Google Calendar, it’s full of CS tutoring hours! A reality though about CS at Wellesley is that it is a bit difficult to register for CS courses due to high demand. But, the professors I’ve had so far are amazing and do their best to support every student trying to study CS.
To deal with all these deadlines and academic stressors, my approach is to take it all one small piece at a time. If I think about all these exams and projects as a whole looming over me, I start freaking out. The more I start slowly chipping away at my parts of work, the more achievable it feels.
Thanks for reading this week! I have included some adorable photos from volunteering at the local cat shelter this week as a de-stressor!
Action shot
Those eyes!
All three tabby kitties sharing one den