<p>So since this is my first post, rather than give an autobiography, I'm just going to state this part briefly: I've always been a pretty decent student in college, averaged mostly in A's-B's range...in high school my weighted GPA was probably near a 5.0..; I am a senior now, I transferred from another school that was on a quarter system after 4 quarters, took 2 off, and w/ my current uni's requirements (pretty much all the general ones, not ones for my major), despite having 105 credits not including my current courses (15 shy of what's needed for my degree) I am taking probably another whole fifth year before I've satisfied everything... that pretty much should get you all caught up. ;)</p>
<p>So that in itself is already a bit of a frustration, given that if I weren't so broke (almost everything I'm not paying for out of pocket is in loans...no, scratch that, lol they're all loans...that's what happens when you live in one of the most expensive places in the US and on paper you look rather wealthy and so don't get any aid...) I'd likely have been able to graduate after this semester, b/c I could've afforded room/board the past two summers. Anyway, this is about my (relatively pretty recent) GPA frustrations.</p>
<p>I've worked hard to keep my GPA above a 3.0 since freshman year; every semester (or quarter) since, I've been able to get b/w cumulative 3.2's and 3.3's (excluding the summer before I transferred and took summer gen-chem II as a non-matric, and then came into the fall with around a 2.7 :P) I started out undeclared as a bio major at first, didn't declare anything until beginning of Spring'11 (last year), IIRC -- but as a Psych BS. I mean I already had most of the Natural Science req's done...and I'm looking at the more bio-psych areas of psych so makes sense, right? Bio courses were mostly what always kept my GPA down...I think the fact that last spring, the first term in college that I didn't take any biology courses, I got a 3.45 semester GPA -- my highest in my college career, makes that pretty apparent. :P</p>
<p>So usually having one fiasco of a semester in your college career is mostly okay, right? ...Yeah, I guess usually when that happens, it's people who goofed off their freshman year or something....not a senior who was a victim of confounding circumstance* (seriously, you don't even have to actually read the crap after the "*" at the end of this post, to just presume from its lengthiness what I'm saying here... haha. but for fun or whatever it's all there anyway! lmao) that led to like a 1.4-something semester GPA, bringing the cumulative down to a 2.63, and now only has 3 more semesters to get it back up to at least a 3.0. >:/</p>
<p>See what annoys me also is the fact that you are really limited, at least at my school, once you drop below a 3.0...can't live in the upperclassman/graduate apartments, the research experience I pretty much am obligated to have if I expect to be accepted into any grad school, is much harder to find -- it was already hard enough when I had to eliminate every professor or program that requires at least an overall 3.5!! And there's still the issue of being very limited with summer courses, only to those that are offered at a campus near me locally, which is about 10% of what's offered on-campus...</p>
<p>So I feel like now not only did I do all that work in vain (which I feel is maybe double what a lot of BA majors in social sciences have done... I'm not trying to be condescending, but when I talk to a lot of them I realize how many hard courses I've taken, that have kept my GPA <3.5, and also how much extra work they are, and it just is kinda irritating. But I'm told a BS with a 3.2 "looks better" to grad schools than a BA with like a 3.9...) --but also, that I nearly (if not completely) blew my chances of going to grad school, at least directly, unless I end up taking SIX years to get a Bachelor's. </p>
<p>Maybe I'm doing the math wrong (funny because CalcI is one of the only 3 courses I've gotten a full A in in all of college so far!! hahaha) but I've already calculated it manually according to instructions on websites, as well as typed my grades into several websites, and it just seems soooooo friggin unfair to me, that everyone who goofed off their entire freshman year while I worked my skin to the bone trying to keep >3.0, had the chance to do just that, while I screw up right on time to annihilate my college career and possibly my career in general... I mean am I missing something here?? Is there some trick I don't know about or some way that uni's tend to "excuse" things like this, and I was never made aware because it wasn't ever a problem I needed to address? haha.</p>
<p>So, anyone who has gotten this far in my incessant (and maybe pointless) rant -- advice?? Am I the first person to have their crappy semester as an upperclassman and not a freshman?? And what about all this research stuff? The irony of it is I have what I've coined "senior year itch" -- kinda like "senioritis" but for aspiring grad students... I've just mentally given up on requirements and cant get my heart into it, and so I tend to do better with upper division psych electives than anything; I also often tend to "waste time" online reading journal articles and academic literature instead of doing coursework! LOL so it's like I've already transitioned into a grad school mindset and cant get myself to do this menial (at least that's what it seems like to me) coursework; especially when I'm so tired of not having a job (or struggling to find one since transferring), and kinda just wanna be done with the taking-courses-courses-and-more-courses-then-exams-and-exams-and-more-exams lifestyle that I now have another year of than most undergrads as it is....</p>
<p>*NOTE: I've been taking medication for ADHD, though I'm not sure if that's really what I have, or if it's just some sort of sleep cycle issue, or burnout from chronic stress and poor adrenal function or something...or "poopout" from chronic antidepressant use for anxiety that has left me apathetic and lethargic..or a combination of the latter two..? haha. But anyway, I've been using it mostly to get me out of bed in the morning, as I've had to take morning classes that only had one section offered... if I'm not mistaken, every semester thus far since transferring. At one point my dose was reduced (which I feel is my fault in a way for telling my doctor the initial dose sounded too high...), like in October, and I was sleeping through most of my classes for a few weeks, or maybe half of them, at least. At the end of Sept. I spilled a drink on my keyboard (mind you that is the first time that has happened to me in the 4 years I've had this laptop!!) and for about the next whole week I had no functional computer, and had to keep messing with the BIOS and restarting and trying to work on a machine that had a keyboard with a mind of its own most of the time.... at times like midnight...4am...8am...to get assignments done. Then I buy a replacement wireless keyboard/mouse when I finally have the money that I told my parents I need (did I mention I was broke?) and the weekend before Halloween (the day another assignment was due, btw) I was trying to get my laptop to be partitioned properly for once since I got it... it strangely came with a 30g logical drive out of 160g total, and ever since it's ended up divided into multiple arbitrary partitions, lol I just wanted a normal machine!!!</p>
<p>I figure that since I don't have a flash drive or external HDD that I was willing to reformat and lose everything that is on them, I don't really have a way of backing up my stuff, and since the software I was using was rated so highly in reviews, I figured there isn't much of a chance that I'd lose everything... well maybe the program is okay, but my computer decided to freeze while working on "operation 4 of 8", which happened to be my C drive!! >:/ So 12 hours later, on a Sunday, it was still stuck there, and even though it says to not power off your machine, I had an assignment due and felt I had no choice.... I power it back on and it basically tells me I have no OS installed. :O So I took the following week to try to find free software (since I'm poor and all) to recover my lost stuff... well that took awhile, and then when I finally got it working, it was acting kinda slow and weird but I figured that's Vista being Vista... haha. Anyway so a week after THAT -- which was Thanksgiving break -- it crashed randomly! Again!! On a Saturday night, before an assignment due on a Monday morning!! AGAIN! </p>
<p>And then a week and a half after that I woke up at 6am with severe flank pain, went to the ER that weekend and found out I had a kidney infection, was told to take at least the following week off which happened to be the last week of classes.... </p>
<p>Had to take I's and then arrange with all my instructors to get them changed to grades. Got a call from Client Support on campus, whom I brought my laptop to a few days before the kidney pain issue, that my hard drive "appears to be malfunctioning" and I needed to replace it... oh that's nice, lol. Anyways, there was this one class I found ridiculously unreasonably demanding or a 100-level course (-- not the material in itself, but dumb rules like "you must bring a printed copy of all assignments to class, online submissions are not graded" -- that was a first for me; and also there were like several assignments due per week, maybe as many as 6 separate ones....which is logistically, IMHO, unreasonable for a typical college schedule! I'd rather hae huge assignments due every other week (barring perfectly timed computer crashes)! It was for one of the requirements I needed and I was intending at first to go to the student health clinic and find out *** was wrong with me because doesn't this seem like something that would impair my academic functioning? lol. But then since I kept sleeping so much all the time, I'd miss appointments that <em>I</em> scheduled, to get to the bottom of why I sleep so much!! LOL. Anyway, long story short I got an F in that class... </p>
<p>Forgot to mention that the course that my laptop was not allowing me to complete assignments for, was an upper-division one for my major.. a psych research methods one, and the papers we had to write were hypothetical, but when the rough draft of our results section was due.. well, 5 days before it was due, whomever is in charge of this course decided that we now have to use actual numerical values in our results sections (even though the "studies" are entirely hypothetical), and these actual numerical values had to make actual contextual sense. ARE YOU KIDDING ME?? </p>
<p>Ultimately that also screwed me over, because I was so preoccupied and concerned over that section... "is this a reasonable number for an ANOVA?" "Am I even using the right ANOVA?" "Do I get points off if I use APA 6th edition instead of 5th to cite this data?" "IF 5th was shown in class and I use 6th, then won't I get points off for 6th instead?" </p>
<p>Our TA also told us after that whole "you need to use real numbers now" deal, that we can still just draw graphs in MS Paint... how can you use "real" data, and appropriately APA-formatted graphs, by drawing crap in MS Paint? </p>
<p>So instead, I figured it's not worth the risk and I'd just do it the "long way", and make a "Real" graph to not risk losing points.....</p>
<p>Oh yeah, but most stats software requires RAW DATA INPUT in order to provide OUTPUT. oops. Still didn't want to use Paint though... so I started making up random numerical values/finding number generators.</p>
<p>Anyway this crap just went on and on, into this semester, and I ended up not turning the paper in the first week like I arranged with the prof. after my kidneys decided to stop working... I kinda just froze up, which I tend to do under a certain amt. of stress, and a week later, I was still avoided my email inbox because I was dreading getting one asking for my paper... anyway, I think it was the week of Valentine's Day that I finally got myself to read my email (because avoiding it was causing other issues with communication w/ everyone else :P) and saw something dated the 6th saying I didnt reply by then and so "forfeited" my chances of completing the paper.. afterwards I saw one dated 1/31 that mentioned all that... so yeah, ended up with 2 F's, one in a 4-credit course...</p>
<p>Also, I feel kind of like my body has done me great injustice, as I noticed that after the infection cleared, I wasn't getting kidney/flank pains I'd been getting since September (which I assumed were related to my increased coffee intake or something...lol) and I've heard that upper UTI's (i.e. kidneys, mainly) can go unnoticed/asymptomatic for a long time before you find out or suspect anything's wrong. Makes me wonder if I just had an infection the entirety of last semester and that was messing with my sleep/energy even more than the mess it usually is.... I also lost a lot of weight (well, about 10 pounds, but w/ my BMI that put me into "underweight" range on the BMI scale, lol) even though I felt like I was always eating, and perhaps expending as much energy going places to obtain food, as I was taking in eating..</p>
<p>So I'm not sure I can "undo" these F's in any way retroactively by somehow proving my entire semester was screwed around with by my body and my PC (which I was afraid to mention because it kept happening on weekends before Mon. AM due dates, and I already felt really lame having to ask to be excused twice for not submitting stuff, before the HD crash ordeal even began....)</p>