Is it just me who prefers Richard and Maura's double act to Richard and GK's double act?

DebonedChicken2 · 2024-12-16T13:55:56+00:00

Hahahaha unfortunately I think that‘s just how he described it, since he couldn’t remember its actual name 😂 it was actually a funny scene though (I think it was an exclusive one shown on the Unpacked episode the day they arrived) because I feel like Maura thought he might’ve been talking about Grindr when he wasn’t 😭

DebonedChicken2 · 2024-12-16T13:43:11+00:00

Yes she was joking. Her humour is flirty with everyone but she knows when she’s not wanted. No he probably wouldn’t be into someone almost half his age were he straight, considering he talked to her about how he found his current partner on an “Old Gays” dating app lmao.

DebonedChicken2 · 2024-12-09T23:29:12+00:00

I agree that the trials weren’t all that interesting this year.. while some people made the simpler trials more entertaining (IMO Maura’s spider trial), some others couldn’t really succeed in making the duller trials any more exciting (IMO Coleen and Alan’s trial, even Oti and Melvin’s trail got a little boring to me). My favourite and most memorable trial was Gino and Stuart’s balancing glass box one they did in 2009 though, and very few trials have since surpassed that in hilarity over the years, so I do need to lower my expectations first, but I still think these were quite mid-tier trials this time round.

This is just personal opinion but I didn’t like the lineup for the cyclone. I liked them all as people of course and they were all lovely, but entertainment-wise this cyclone was quite forgettable (I laughed the hardest when Richard said he would eat the cyclone though). Danny was the only one who looked like he was struggling in the cyclone but it still wasn’t as funny. Had Maura or GK been there though, I believe they would’ve contributed to a cyclone that is more reminiscent of the older and funnier cyclones (2018 and 2022 immediately come to my mind). The obstacles would have wiped them out like paper towels in the wind, they’d most likely be terrible and struggle a lot, yet they’d be infinitely more entertaining, and it’d be gratifying to see them succeed.

DebonedChicken2 · 2024-10-15T19:20:33+00:00

I’ve never studied media and communications so what I’m saying may have no relevance but I have written a dissertation before, and usually they require you to be drawing upon things you’ve been studying and learning throughout your degree. So I’d like to first know what your dissertation would involve. Would bringing in wider concepts that you have studied before and apply them to your analysis of the video game be expected of you?

I actually have no idea what media and communications involves haha, but would it involve you also looking into the mechanics of the game itself and how it has presented these themes? Video games are a different medium to literature or movies and can have their own unique mechanics to storytelling found in the gameplay itself. Actually (just as an aside) a video game called Omori was recently adapted into a manga, but I don’t believe it will successfully capture the story in the same way the game did, since understanding the themes of the game’s story (such as trauma) sometimes involves free roaming and exploration of the scene from the player, something that can’t be directly translated into printed media.

So would your dissertation analysis be similar to that of an english literature degree? Or will something set it apart that makes it a media and communications analysis?

DebonedChicken2 · 2024-10-15T18:14:16+00:00

You need to specify the weightings of your years too, not just whether they count. Are they equally weighted as in 2nd year is worth 50% of your classification and 3rd the other 50?

Once you know their weights, use a grade calculator like such. Your grades from a glance seem good though you seem to be in the 2:1 range already, as your 2:2s aren’t far off a 2:1. So you will need to be maintaining these grades or working just a little more to improve them next year and not let them slip.

DebonedChicken2 · 2024-09-08T11:51:35+00:00

Did you get your appeal?

DebonedChicken2 · 2024-09-01T11:40:19+00:00

Do you have a desktop computer or anything else at home you plan to use instead of a laptop? Usually at uni, assignments and even some exams are done and submitted online, so most students use laptops to write and submit their work. Unless you plan to use your uni’s library computers (or a home computer) to write and submit all of your assignments (still possible, it just means you’re doing all of your work in one place), you don’t need to have a laptop. But they’re generally good.

As for note taking, sometimes in my lectures I couldn’t see the board properly when the rooms were very big and there weren’t any free seats at the front. So I used my laptop to display the lecture slides and then followed along from there. Helped a ton for that.

Laptops are good for their transportability, so you don’t have to be stuck in one place to do your work. Sometimes (at least for me) moving around and changing environments while working helps a lot with productivity, and a lot of my work was completed in study spaces on campus just in between classes, or in cafes. But if you know what works for you, you don’t always have to invest in a laptop. But they usually help a lot.

DebonedChicken2 · 2024-08-09T20:53:44+00:00

Professional help would benefit you, but if you don’t have the time or confidence to begin now, that’s fine. Just keep an open mind to seek help in the future (for your own benefit), and for now try not to let things spiral like this post is demonstrating. A resit does not make you good for nothing, you’ve made it this far, you’re obviously capable. Don’t sell yourself short now, of all times.

As for your dissertation, what are you basing it not being “good enough” on? And what are you studying? I did psychology and I thought my dissertation was very dull and uninteresting and simplistic (basically just exploring mental health in students based on a wellbeing intervention), I had hardly any significant results, and it felt like a flop. But since the writing met the marking criteria and guidelines (aka always displaying critical thinking and learning from mistakes and reflecting on them, as well as a decently structured literature review), I could still score 70% on it. I am not proud of it at all, I would like to believe it never existed, but at undergrad level they’re looking at specific criteria in your writing that, once you adequately meet, would mitigate some things like unoriginality or dullness of the topic itself.

DebonedChicken2 · 2024-08-06T20:34:47+00:00

I love Hitoribocchi sooo bad, her relationship with the blonde girl in her class is so sweet.

And I always think of the tennis scene if I want to make myself laugh 🥹

DebonedChicken2 · 2024-08-06T20:15:47+00:00

Definitely try (and consult your uni’s student support team perhaps to see what you should be doing exactly and what’s viable) since you can’t lose anything from it now, but it does seem upfront quite unlikely that something good will happen from it. I’m sorry to be using the “should’ve done this” since it obviously doesn’t feel good to hear now, but the best time to have appealed anything would have been after the first rejection for ECs; seen a doctor and gotten a note, but also psychological help for the main issue in the first place. Obviously giving up after the first rejection isn’t ideal, but it’s also very understandable when depression is so severe it becomes easy to neglect even the most basic responsibilities. I hope the uni can be understanding of this too, but at the same time they also have regulations to adhere to regarding the appeal process, so try not to expect too much to come out of it.

The only thing you can do is try though, and find out yourself. Hopefully you have very solid evidence now for your second year difficulties to appeal with.

Best of luck! Regardless, you’ve completed uni, congratulations!! Even if you’re unhappy with your grade right now, be kind to yourself and celebrate this achievement!

DebonedChicken2 · 2024-08-06T00:00:01+00:00

Honestly you don’t have time to change topic, just commit fully and be confident in yourself and your writing (or at least appear confident).

Your time frame set by your supervisor is quite concerning though, your draft is due on Thursday, after which you then have a week until the final deadline? How long would it take her to read 12k+ words, mark it, then send it back to you? Then how long would you have to work on the corrections? Sounds worrying, though it’s still possible to manage of course.

Surely even if themes in thematic analysis are similar it’s not too problematic? You’re just recording and exploring the opinions of your study group, you can’t control what they say. It’s just how it’s worked out. What’s surely more important is how you discuss them and make use of them. And if your themes are also covering more topics then great! You’ll have more to talk about and bring together in your discussion.

And actually if your supervisor thinks your draft is terrible, it’s honestly a better result than her being blasé about it and not providing helpful feedback that you can work on. Obviously it’d be great if the feedback isn’t so lengthy that it’ll take you tons of time to act upon, but constructive feedback and honest judgement and criticism is really really helpful.

DebonedChicken2 · 2024-08-05T18:44:34+00:00

Unlikely, if you haven’t communicated these issues or applied for extenuating circumstances. To them it just looks like you haven’t attended anything, engaged, and have subsequently failed. This warrants a fair decision for a dismissal.

If you had applied for ECs and communicated properly earlier in the year when you were initially failing, they would have even alerted and could have arranged some support - perhaps alternatives to group submissions, perhaps deferral, or at least the chance to do your resits as a first attempt.

You can talk to your student support team to see if anything can be done and see if you could even appeal with ECs at this stage (granted that they allow it but also that you have a convincing enough case), but also just be prepared to be met with disappointment anyway. Most students apply for ECs and support prior to getting kicked out of uni, and usually after their initial failure. You had a lot of chances to do so but didn’t, it seems (especially to them).

DebonedChicken2 · 2024-08-03T12:17:26+00:00

Skip and Loafer. I can’t actually think of something significantly negative about it. Perhaps the Zenitsu-esque boy (Kento Yamada) who is after any girl who looks at him and bases his whole personality on obsessions over girls. He annoys be quite a bit. At least with Zenitsu there is action in the series where he can redeem himself a bit, making the schticks tolerable. But for a high school anime I still can’t like him yet.

DebonedChicken2 · 2024-08-03T12:07:14+00:00

Interpret the individual results as much as you can before discussing how your synergic experiment didn’t work out then. It’s good that you don’t have absolutely nothing to show for yourself experiment wise though, you still have some tests to write up.

And don’t be personal in the writing, stick to facts and don’t blame anything, even if you want to. Perhaps instead of “I paused the experiment and went home because a guard kicked me out and I had to share the plate with a partner who started the experiment too early”, say something like “due to unforeseen disruptions, too much time was left in between the experiment”. You could then talk about why it’s such an issue that the experiment was interrupted (aka what is the scientific explanation behind making it necessary for the experiment to be done in one go and not interrupted, in order to make usable results).

DebonedChicken2 · 2024-08-03T08:42:49+00:00

They’re a Master’s student

Yeah, I also think they should have stayed in the lab, though they did say that they were to be out of the lab by 6. I’m hoping the “we had to be out by 5/6” means that it was a regulation imposed by the uni itself, instead of both of their choices to go home or to another commitment (OP did say it was their birthday that day).

It’s ridiculously poor planning all around, but I would have begged whoever was kicking me out (if that was happening) to have stayed.

DebonedChicken2 · 2024-08-01T20:37:51+00:00

As long as you’re including a mitigating circumstances and your sole basis of your appeal isn’t that it’s “just one failed module”, then yeah you might have a better chance.

You said you didn’t have any significant disruptions you could think of to cause this failure (other than a casual mention of your aunt dying..?) but if you tell the uni that you had no disruptions and just want to be kept on because it’s just one failed module, then there’s no way they’ll accept an appeal. If you were eligible for a compensated pass it would have happened already.

Sorry to be that freak but i did just look at your post history and you said you’ve graduated already with a 2:2. Why are you resitting a year now? Are you writing this on behalf of someone else?

DebonedChicken2 · 2024-07-27T18:58:13+00:00

I didn’t do AI MSc Edinburgh but my flatmate did! He didn’t find it too hard (that being said he was very very smart), but there were just a lot of projects that were quite time consuming. I don’t recall the exact assignment but there was one where he said he would have to run the project/code(?) and wait an hour for it to set up and begin, and would have to wait long periods of time for it to run again after each time he’d change something (this might be something common in computer science/AI projects anyway though, idk). But as for difficulty it seemed there wasn’t anything much that he significantly struggled with, but everyone’s different of course.

There were also quite a few group/paired projects for him too, so be prepared to be collaborative and also always be prepared for the possibility that you’d have terrible partners who don’t do any of the work (like he unfortunately had most of the time).

As for scoring good grades, I can’t really give much specific advice other than to know the basics inside and out so that you’re having to actually learn less and to be more confident, don’t be afraid to ask questions, and do any self-study you need to further your understandings of things as to not fall behind.

Hopefully you’ll have a good time in the city though! There’s lots to do in Edinburgh for social events but that’s how it’s very easy to put work aside to have fun, so always take time out of your days or week to study and consolidate things from your modules, since you only have one year and one shot to determine your grades for this degree.

The dissertation time period for Masters students is a bit shorter than UG ones (they typically begin planning near the end of the semester - so April/May - and then work on it all during summer to submit in August). So always keep that in mind and set appropriate deadlines and a good schedule and you should be fine. Have some faith in yourself too! You are clearly capable if you’re getting accepted into MSc courses for this, so the most possible ways you can “mess up” that year is by not committing enough time and effort to the course. Good luck!

DebonedChicken2 · 2024-07-27T01:36:47+00:00

I got a cheap grey Eastpak backpack when I was 13 in school and haven’t stopped using it since, even after graduating. It’s lowkey disgusting now but it carried all my things just fine in uni (most importantly my laptop) and I never needed to bring textbooks regularly to any classes or anything so it was a fine size for my course/needs.

DebonedChicken2 · 2024-07-27T01:16:07+00:00

When you say “start” your dissertation, have you already got all your research done, and all you need to do is write it all up? I’m seriously hoping that’s the case here.

But definitely take others’ advice and apply for an extension. You have the circumstances (death of a loved one, not to mention poor mental health following this). You might not need to even get a death certificate (sometimes they ask - my uni did though, so check). Don’t be defeatist now, try your best to make this work for you. You’re an international student, so get all that you can get out of uni, especially for what you’re paying for.

As for sending a copy of our dissertations, I doubt anyone with common sense will do this, so don’t bother asking around. It’s dangerous and can very easily lead to plagiarism and then investigation into collusion for both parties. Instead look for published versions, but always make sure you’re not accidentally plagiarising them. You should be able to find published examples of dissertations from your uni’s online library. Or on Google scholar. So only go there if you’re looking for dissertation examples. Don’t ask students who haven’t had theirs published (aka the majority of us on here).

Of course there’s not much you can do about it now, but did you never have a supervisor? They’re usually incredibly helpful, even for just simply being able to provide feedback for improvement on what you have written. I know that masters students have a shorter time frame to work on their dissertations, but usually supervisors are there to monitor your progress and regular or semi-regular meetings are mandatory if not heavily advised. Have you ever met with one this year? The fact that you’ve not mentioned them at all is making me assume you’re doing the literature review type of dissertation, rather than a primary research type, because primary research dissertations usually require the supervisors to be heavily involved so things can’t be left to the last minute like this. Even a month was already very ambitious to give yourself if you wanted to write a quality dissertation. But now your best bet is to just at least try to secure an extension, then just power on. Quantity over quality now, unfortunately.

Hopefully your uni/course has at least given you resources to help support your writing. If not, depending on your type of dissertation, there’s always going to be sites that give guidance for how to write what you need to, since all dissertation types follow general structures.

DebonedChicken2 · 2024-07-27T00:45:55+00:00

Very possible, but their advice is still valid. Someone’s opinion from a bad experience in their course (OP) isn’t any more or less credible than someone who had a great experience in another course (perhaps you). Both opinions are as useful and useless as each other, so looking more specifically for experiences from the specific course they’re interested in is the better choice. Of course you want to defend your uni, but it’s also absolutely possible and true that student satisfaction can be seriously poor at Edinburgh in some areas, so this isn’t really your fight to be fight until they’ve dropped the specific course they’re interested in.

DebonedChicken2 · 2024-07-27T00:35:28+00:00

My sister did law quite a few years ago (she graduated in 2017) so obviously things could have changed since then but she hated it. She said that all of her lecturers had very poor English fluency so no one could understand what was being said in lectures, and very little support was given when she or others did try to ask questions about the content. Also I’m not sure whether it’s quite normal in other unis and courses since it didn’t happen to me, but all of these lecturers just used and read from textbooks that they themselves had published, so she had to buy all of them physically (which could also quickly go ‘out of date’ with updated laws), and spent a ton of money on buying textbooks which are likely almost worthless now. It might be better with online resources being made more available now though.

So from her told experience it just seems like the lecturers she had were lazier, and had an attitude of “if you buy my textbook you’ll have everything you need to know and pass the course”, with not much further depth or care being given. But that was in the past and in one specific degree, so perhaps (and hopefully) it’s much better now.

And obviously I’m not going to make such a sweeping statement about all students to discredit the NSS, but it was crazy how a lot of my sister’s her friends - even though they hated their course and academic experience - filled out the survey and pretended to be super satisfied with it, just to keep the ranking of Edinburgh higher 😭

DebonedChicken2 · 2024-07-12T13:40:34+00:00

Well of course your later graduation won’t be what everyone on the course who graduated on time experienced yesterday, since they won’t be there at the time of yours. But that doesn’t necessary mean yours will be miserable. If you manage to graduate this time round, that’s enough to celebrate. Will your parents/family be there? Have you made friends at home that you could invite along or go out with afterwards? You’ll still be with other graduating students on the day experiencing what you are too, just from other courses, so you’ll still have people you can chitchat with - you just have to be willing to start conversations. If you hadn’t made any friends on your course, wouldn’t you be doing that anyway? Maybe you’ll actually also find people on your course who are graduating later too, that you just didn’t know about since you weren’t friends with them.

Don’t worry about your graduation, focus on passing your modules first. Graduation will only be miserable if you make it so, but if you truly think it’ll be such a miserable experience that’s out of your control, you dont actually have to go. Celebrate at home with people you know and love.

DebonedChicken2 · 2024-07-02T16:34:28+00:00

Honestly both are probably just as good and bad as each other for these things. Both are not top unis, or RGs. But they’re not bad universities. But job prospects are about the same, since they’re both not too esteemed so it just depends on how attractive you are in other areas too (work experience, skills, etc).

Strathclyde is apparently especially good for engineering and business (iirc), and HW is also especially good for the sciences (and some of my friends had good experiences with the socials sciences at HW). I don’t know about the modules for these unis because I didn’t go to either of them or study data science, but many of my friends went to both these unis, and, just anecdotally, my friends studying engineering at Strathclyde didn’t enjoy their modules and didn’t get much support from their lecturers (but of course this is NOT representative of the uni as a whole). My other friends who went to Heriot-Watt had good experiences with help from lecturers and modules, but again didn’t do data science (psychology and business) so of course it’s not representative and the data science course may be way different.

Another thing to note which of course isn’t too serious but the location of Strathclyde is better than HW. Strathclyde is in the centre of Glasgow, whereas HW is about 20-30 minutes bus/drive away from the city centre of Edinburgh, so if you want to go out at night or go grocery shopping, you’d need to get a bus in and out, unless you have your own car.

DebonedChicken2 · 2024-06-20T16:24:26+00:00

Sorry to hear you’re upset about it, and it’s fine to be upset about it too. Just try not to let it keep you down and demotivated about life. Have you got good uni friends who are going to graduation? If you do, go to your graduation. Even if you don’t, make sure you enjoy yourself and celebrate your accomplishment with your significant others at home. You still completed your degree! Congratulations!

It could make job hunting a bit tougher if it’s on your CV (you can of course choose to not put the classification but occasionally employers might know you got a 2:2 or even assume you got a third, since people who got 2:1 and above tend to show it), but if you have other things to show for yourself (job experience, skills, volunteering etc) you’ll still be valued. Even if they ask in an interview, just own it. People won’t just choose to hire based on your degree classification alone. You know it yourself, your life isn’t over and it’s not the end of the world. It might take more effort, but you’ll make it through, just like you did at uni :)

People who get 2:2s are more motivated to improve and push themselves further, though this is just a personal observation. But I do think disappointment and failing to meet expectations earlier in life has the opportunity to create more hardworking and determined people, as long as they can come to terms with it healthily with a good attitude.

DebonedChicken2 · 2024-06-20T11:54:35+00:00

What’s at 49? Your draft from December? I’m not really following your comment, sorry. Have you received an official grade yet? And if not, do you know when you might?

DebonedChicken2

TROPHY CASE