[s]Goal: 100,000 New Goal: 200,000[/s] New Goal: 250.000

[Smiley73]

Mmm brownies

I love it when people have birthdays

 

cake?

[Nyanna al'Meara]

-hugs- I'm off to go do some school work. See you all later :)

*squish* ta-ta. Have a good day :)

[Crimson_Ayla]

Brownies *nod*

[Nyanna al'Meara]

OK let's see, news from this week

Ooo, twinneh, storytime!!!

[Nyanna al'Meara]

 

 

 

 

 

 

Mwaha tis badass

It is :3

And....

 

 

O.0

 

MEEEEEEEPPPP

 

*hides under covers*

MEEP!

SPIDERS!!!! *shakes*

Not a fan either - arachnophobia :L

Ikr!! Everything's crawling now >.<

[Crimson_Ayla]

*sits crossy legged on cushion*

[Smiley73]

Monday was Ten club, which was pretty cool, not the best talk yet but interesting thought starters anyway (the presentations were "Why aid is killing africa" and the other was a bit harder to title, think it was something about the mind and the "self" all sorts of brain-related stuff which was pretty cool). Pizzas = highlight. And Bar one sauce in ice cream. I need a bar one.

[Smiley73]

Tuesday I did my french Eisteddfod speech, which apparently was good. Otherwise I spent a lot of time studying for the upcoming IT (wednesday) and Biology (Thursday) tests

[Smiley73]

Did the IT test first period. I think it went pretty well, though knowing my IT teacher we'll get those marks back in like... never.

 

Also rather fortunate that IT was first lesson 'cause at 9:30 I went off to Stellenbosch University for something called the Minquiz.  It was basically somewhere between a science and maths test and an olympiad. Stuff on the syllabus, stuff that was recently added, or recently taken away. We got chosen based on our science marks, I think four or five boys got asked, and it's a three-man team, but only three people were keen so that was fine.

[Smiley73]

SO this test is right in between my IT and bio tests, I've done minimum preparation (I went through like half a past paper), so with the wonders of modern technology, that morning I turned on the 3G data and downloaded adobe reader for me phone and then used downloaded some past papers our teacher emailed to us. Our science teacher took us in a four seater school car. The trip was rather nice, I sat in the back and did questions (I think I picked up a couple things in the memo that got me a question or two) and we had a fat chat, mostly from our teacher who was mostly telling us about his army days which was quite a laugh

[Smiley73]

Get to stellenbosch eventually, into the process engineering building for reception. tea and stuff, look at all the fancy machines and tubes. The actual program started at about 11 I think. A couple introductory talks later we're in a lecture room (which looked pretty nice - comfy chairs ) taking the individual test. It was four option multiple choice, 40 marks and 5 bonus for tie-breaks, they gave us stationery sets and other stuff in one of those cool drawstring bags.

 

They don't let you use a calculator and there aren't any equations so that's a little challenging but I didn't find many of the questions very difficult. Some of them were basic science stuff (which was hard sometimes because we might have last covered the topic in grade 10 or may not have covered it at all ever, some of the stuff we had just done). Same thing with the maths stuff, a mix between olympiad-type questions and just standard maths (again which may be slightly more difficult because I haven't done it in a while or because no formulas)

[Smiley73]

So I walked out feeling pretty good, I finished the entire questionnaire, the bonus questions had time to look over some problems, the other two boys from my school did not fare as well, neither had time to finish the paper - they got bogged down in questions they couldn't answer.

 

I think the break we had was half an hour or an hour, we got packed lunches from the cafeteria there which were great (fed my bar one cravings )

[Smiley73]

Next I think we had a couple talks, one about the mintek who were the main sponsors and the other about chemical engineering. 

The mintek one was pretty interesting, I think they might be a parastatal - they get 30% of their income from the government - but they offered very nice bursaries, tuition anywhere in the country, money for accomodation etc. and R15 000 (little over 1000 pounds I think) every year spending money. Then you have to work in the holidays every year and work for mitek every year you got tuition (which isn't too bad in terms of having a chance for work experience and job security straight out of uni)

 

Well I know of a better scholarship, but they didn't have for medicine, but it was fiiiiiiiiiiine

[Smiley73]

next we had these oral quiz rounds, there were two categories gold and platinum, I think they were divided on the class/academic prowess of the school? At least the gold questions seemed to be a lot easier than the platinum ones.

 

The fives schools with the highest combined marks for the individual quiz got through. 30 questions in the oral quiz in 10 question sets. 30 seconds for each question (you held up a card board with the answer (A/B/C/D) on it)

[Smiley73]

Two out of the five teams didn't know the sun was the closest star to Earth.

 

I believe the options were:

 

A. The Morning star

B. Jupiter

C. Venus

D. The sun

 

I was like what sort of a question is that, and then two got it wrong >.>

 

One said it was venus, the other said the morning star (which I'm sure is actually just another name for venus)

[Smiley73]

OK we get to the oral quiz. I am card-showererer. We didn't do too badly, we came second in the end by one point angstrong (that was the answer to one of the questions we got wrong :P). Everyone had a contribution though.

[Smiley73]

In prize winning we came up for second in the quiz, we won some money for the school, but they didn't put cash in the envelope just a letter saying we had won that amount of money, they must have transferred it into the account electronically (they were definitely on to us >.>)

 

Then they announced all of the individual prizes - 60 to 80 was a certificate of distinction, 80 and above a certificate of excellence (both the gold and platinum schools wrote the same individual quiz). One of the boys got a certificate of distinction, there were 21 of those in total. So now I'm waiting, hoping my name is going to come up in this second list, I'm pretty sure it would, I was sure I'd done well enough to get something and I wasn't in the first list, the other guy in my team also wasn't called out yet and he's pretty sharp so I was expecting him too.

 

The announcer then says only one person got a certificate of excellence - and I'm buzzing. I want it to be me and I'm like, what about the other guy, or the other people in the room, surely too much to hope for...

 

And I got it :)

[Smiley73]

And then obviously the top ranked student as well and therefore on to Jo'burg for the finals.

 

Didn't expect that. Did not expect all of this.

[Crimson_Ayla]

Oh wow. That's really awesome Diny :)

[Smiley73]

We're done and out of the Campus by about 3:30 but we only got back to school around 5:20 'cause of traffic (blame Bieber or whatever) but it was fine, we had a nice talk in the car. Actually what I really enjoyed was just it was refreshingly different, so often we might have talked about this and that that's wrong or corrupt or whatever which is valid and important to talk about but sometimes you want to here why you're lucky to be living where you are, you know?

 

So my teacher's talking about his time in the UK and just how it affected him and his wife actually rated he went through a stage of clinical depression. Part of it was not fitting into the culture there, part of it was there being so much rain (he lived in the manchester area) and the lack of things to do in his free time (like surf). Or his holiday in the Canary islands that was rather underwhelming. It moved onto more army stories, gun control, social grant stuff in the UK. Nice intellectually stimulating talk.

 

(All this way back I'm hitting my bio notes hard)

[Smiley73]

the rest of that day. just bio. so much bio.

[Nyanna al'Meara]

Woooaaah, busy week!! Congratumalations!! :D

[Crimson_Ayla]

So you're off to Johannesburg?

[Crimson_Ayla]

England's not that bad

[Smiley73]

England's not that bad

 

maybe not for you, you've lived there all your life, for me the change in how much sunlight I get or how many days of rain there are might be a major factor in my happiness. Or how well I fit into a culture there