Year 2 begins!

After dreading the evitability of returning to school and Prince George all summer, here I am.
Surprisingly, after unpacking everything and saying hi to my good ol' roommates (same as last year), I feel fine now. In fact, after the first week of classes, I feel... excited, even!
I get to learn all this cool stuff:

• ENSC 210 Material and Energy Balances. As far as I can tell, this course is stoichiometry on steroids. We've been told by former students that this course is tough, but very important stuff to know in our field, so I'm interested to see what we're going to learn.
• ENSC 451 Groundwater Hydrology. Lots of terminology but rest assured, apparently all our testing will be based on calculations. Is this taught by an engineer? Yes.
• MATH 371 Probability and Statistics for Scientists and Engineers. This course is legendary in how hard it is. Luckily, this semester they've set up Supplemental Instruction (SI), which is basically a separate tutorial led by a peer tutor who has already taken the course and done well.
• ENSC 302 Energy Development. Endless charts and graphs of CO2 emissions, energy consumption, forecasts of global temperatures - per country, per capita, etc. Quite depressing, really - the future looks rather bleak. This course has no pre-requisites, though, so there isn't a lot of math involved, which is a nice change.
• CHEM 201 Organic Chemistry. Brute force memorization. Again, I don't think there is going to be much math involved in this course either, but I don't think this course is going to be any easier because of that fact.
• CHEM 200 Physical Chemistry. So far I think this course is all about manipulating/differentiating/integrating all kinds of crazy equations that try to improve on PV=nRT, which, we have already drilled into our brains from the first few lectures, is useless for REAL gases.

There are 6 courses on there, but on the bright side, no labs, so I still consider that a win. My optimism might fade by midterm-time, but until then, life's good! My life consists of going to classes, hitting the awesome gym, potlucking with friends, and of course, never ending studying and homework.

My goal this semester is to agonize as little as possible, by which I mean I plan to do things the easy way instead of the hard way whenever possible. So I intend to spend more time working with other people and asking for help and less time agonizing alone.

Yay for efficiency!

We'll see how this goes.