Print

Please login or register.
1 Hour 1 Day 1 Week 1 Month Forever
Login with username, password and session length

[lue]

Don't let people tell you that you won't get in, at least until you've tried. It's surprising what can happen.

Hell, Yale contacted me to see if I'd be interested in attending--all I did was score well on my ACT and get the second highest score in my school on some prestigious test or another, all utter bullshit; my grades were mediocre, hovering around a 3.8 GPA, and I participated in absolutely no extracurriculars, which is apparently the most important thing now, because uni is about socializing, not learning--but I avoided that like the plague for obvious reasons.

Most annoying thing for me when the whole spiel on college was being given to us throughout high school was that

• You have to get into at least one extra-curricular, because colleges don't won't "closet cases" or whatever the terminology precisely is. As we all know, learning is a synonym for socializing, and study hall is synonymous with fraternity.
• "You must visit every college you apply for, to see if it's a good fit for you", followed by no information on what to do if you couldn't financially afford the luxury, thus indicating no such assistance programs existed. It's a sound concept sure (to the point where teachers understand if you're absent for it, yay!), but it seemed to have been invented while forgetting that the magic of transportation and temporary lodging is obtained by exchanging an arcane token of representation of material gain called "extra dollars".

[Flying Dice]

mediocre, hovering around a 3.8 GPA

no i don't think so

My high school offered International Baccalaureate courses, which were essentially AP on steroids (an international standard rather than a national one; our papers and recordings of our other major projects were sent overseas to other program instructors for grading), or more accurately, like high-level university courses; they were weighed strangely to indicate this, so someone who took a full set of IB courses had a maximum GPA of 4.5.

Spoiler: Gushing (click to show/hide)

To be perfectly honest, that more than anything else made me love my high school. They were all two-year courses with the same instructor for both years, the best example of which was my English class. The teacher was brilliant, and the structure was great. The entire course was run in cooperative Socratic seminar: the class was set up in a square along the edges of the room facing inward; he'd walk in, say "Okay, we're going to talk about [Work X] today. Go.", and sit back and take notes on our discussion. If we ran out of steam (rarely), he'd pose a prompting question or two to get things started up again. It certainly helped that we had a... diverse set of ideologies.

Our first year assessment was to prepare and deliver a fifteen minute talk on a topic of our choice from the stuff we'd covered (I did something or other related to the Metamorphoses, don't remember exactly what). At the end of the second year we had to turn in a 15ish page paper, as well as one other thing. Basically, we'd walk into a room on the day of our final assessment, be allowed to randomly select an envelope from a basket, open it, and we'd have twenty minutes to prepare with the quote inside (without any information on the author, text, or context), then give a 15-20 minute talk in front of the teacher on the passage, taking whatever route we wanted to. I got lucky and drew a selection that I absolutely adored taken from A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man, but I digress.

Other stuff included formulating a topic and doing the writing and research on a 15 page paper for the history class, stuff like that. T'was more difficult than the vast majority of the university courses I've had thusfar, and I can't point to a single thing that prepared me better than that. It was actually something of a shock to get to uni and suddenly be back in an environment where instructors just stood and lectured for the full period, or where "discussion" consisted of the professor asking limited-scope questions and calling on people individually. o.0

[Putnam]

IIRC my GPA was 2.4

still got ridic university mail for my 99.93 percentile SAT score #humblebrag

[Skyrunner]

mediocre, hovering around a 3.8 GPA

no i don't think so

mediocre? Not really. 3.8 is considered excellent. Stahp making me sad D:

[Flying Dice]

Nah, if you remove the heavy weighting on some of my classes, my GPA was 3.56. I remember that specifically because if my goddamn cheap-ass university had rounded it properly tot 3.6, I'd have been getting $6,000 more every year in scholarship money. I'm still pissed about that, by the way. If I'd been (more) lazy and taken stupid-easy classes in high school, I could've had a full ride. I guess the lesson is that attempting to better yourself will always result in the system bending you over a table, because doing exceptionally well at an easy task is more societally adaptive than doing decently well at a difficult one. >.>

[Skyrunner]

Still much better than me :x

* Skyrunner crawls off to the sads thread

[LordSlowpoke]

people get scholarships at 3.8 what

as i remember it over here it's at least 4.5 to get a singular dollop from the state, that or something ~extraordinary~

[MaximumZero]

I graduated with a 2.1 high school GPA. Now that you need a bachelor's degree to work at McDonald's, the disinterest from both the school in its students and myself in the school have teamed up to bite me in the ass.

[da_nang]

Bloody nocturnal calf cramp. You just had to ruin my sleep before the exam, didn't you?

[Tiruin]

mediocre, hovering around a 3.8 GPA

no i don't think so

mediocre? Not really. 3.8 is considered excellent. Stahp making me sad D:

Can sadness be rage? This made me rage, right? :S

...Mediocre?! DX

[SomeStupidGuy]

mediocre, hovering around a 3.8 GPA

no i don't think so

mediocre? Not really. 3.8 is considered excellent. Stahp making me sad D:

Can sadness be rage? This made me rage, right? :S

...Mediocre?! DX

Uhm... Yeah, I'm just gonna join in on being sad about this.
I thought I was mediocre-ish, but... well, my grades sure as hell aren't at that point.

[MetalSlimeHunt]

My "T" keycap is broken in a way that I am almost certainly not getting it back on. I am so angry. So angry.

[Flying Dice]

mediocre, hovering around a 3.8 GPA

no i don't think so

mediocre? Not really. 3.8 is considered excellent. Stahp making me sad D:

Can sadness be rage? This made me rage, right? :S

...Mediocre?! DX

Uhm... Yeah, I'm just gonna join in on being sad about this.
I thought I was mediocre-ish, but... well, my grades sure as hell aren't at that point.

To put it in perspective, with that and a 32 cumulative on my ACT (which has a max. score of 36), I only got scholarship offers from a single school (the one I'd spent months buttering up), and no offers of anything but loans from the federal govt. I applied to six schools and all but one basically told me that if I wanted to attend, I'd have to sit and spin, financially speaking. :x

Spoiler: I guess I'm a jerk :c (click to show/hide)

I feel sorta bad now, too, because I just coasted through high school and didn't do much of anything. I didn't remember the date of the ACT and ended up taking it half asleep because I'd been up all night. To be fair, though, the ACT is an absolute joke, all you have to know to do well is how to take standardized tests. I got a perfect score on the science section because it was literally nothing but looking at tables/graphs and regurgitating the data onto the answer sheets. People were getting freaked out because of some question about planetary orbit mechanics or something, but all you had to do was read the table of measurements and find the one it was asking for. >.>

[da_nang]

"Oh hey, what's that in the mailbo-"

"We interrupt your day to inform you of these raised rents."

KILL! MAIM! BURN!

THIRD YEAR IN A ROW. FFS, guys, the entire point of your organization is to provide students with affordable accommodations. How the FUCK is that supposed to happen if you keep jacking up the rents every god damn year.



That's it. Last night's cramp didn't just ruin my sleep. It was a fucking bad omen and has ruined my day and probably my future. The end is nigh. All that's left is a third Numidium roflstomping the city. It also explains why the exam took longer than expected. It ALSO fucking explains why the exam was moved in the last minute to a much smaller room where there was really no space between examinees. Had they put someone taking the same exam as me next to me, I could've literally copied the entire exam. There was really no space. Combine that with the pathetically small deskspace you have...

THERE'S A REASON WHY EXAMS ARE TAKEN IN THE LARGER ROOM, GOD DAMNIT.

Come next nocturnal cramp and I'm running to the hills.

[Akura]

Leaving me room to go to work, and I'm hit with the smell of weed coming from my parents' room. For crap's sake, it's barely 7AM. I'm halfway tempted to replace my stepdad's weed stash with Salvia Divinorum, but that may either A) kill him with shock(salvia itself isn't really dangerous), or B) put me in jail, since I don't actually know if salvia is actually legal in New York(Wikipedia says "...maybe, I don't know?"). Plus, I don't think I have the money for that much salvia.


Also, Oblivion is pissing me off. I try to create a companion using a custom hair and a piece of custom equipment, that latter simply because I didn't to bother with the extra step of going into the game and dropping it onto her. The hair worked, but the custom item not only didn't appear, but the original one in it's original spot(actually both originals, one was a tail-type accessory, the other an amulet-type), disappeared as well. On the companion, the item was presumably replaced with a <MISSING NAME> item.

Then the Construction Set started giving a shitfit when I tried to reload it, apparently removing the item from her inventory. Re-adding it didn't work. Disabling the companion plugin didn't recover the original items, nor did removing the plugin, nor did a full reinstall of the entire clothing set mod that these two items(which share the same model/texture). Apparently, disabling the clothing set plugin, saving the game, then re-enabling it did, but that doesn't explain why adding one item to a companion in a seperate plugin(note, the companion plugin was not active in the savegame at any point) broke it. And although I recovered the broken item, the companion, who was made step-by-step according to the CM Partners guide, is still bugged. I was just going to simply recruit her and play dress-up(the step I wanted to avoid having to do every time), but any time I try accessing her inventory, she strips naked, as opposed to automatically equipping everything according value. I tried recruiting one of the default CM Partners, and found when I accessed that person's inventory, the stuff my companion had teleported over somehow.

I'm just going to delete the whole damn plugin(all 5kb of it), and try again. And somehow, it all took about 2 hours of work.