Wednesday 21 January 2015

Conditional offers

At the moment, i've got conditional offers from 3/4 of the universities i've applied to. All the grades needed seem perfectly achievable, with 320 Ucas points being the highest needed so far.

I'm pleased so far, as i've received an offer from one of my top choices, Cardiff. The offers from Bristol and Portsmouth I will consider, however for a while i've been feeling that either Cardiff or Liverpool are my top choices.
I've yet to hear from Liverpool, but should I not be accepted there, it won't be the end of the world.

I'm going to need to really work hard in the coming months. My Electronics teacher mentioned just before Christmas that we have 17 weeks left of college, not counting holiday weeks which account for another 5 or so. Still, it is not long, and with the current work load i've got, it's not great.

I'm currently way behind on writing a maximum 4000 word story for Creative Writing (Which i'm currently procrastinating from working on), and after this is finished I need to write a commentary on it, talking about my influences, styles of writing that I used, devices and other such things.

Alongside this i've got a lot of work to do on revising and generally keeping on top of Electronics work for the exams. This isn't too hard, but frankly a lot of the time I just don't give two shits about it, so convincing myself to get on with revision can be tricky sometimes, I often focus my college work efforts 100% on Music and Creative Writing, totally ignoring Electronics.
On the positive side, this is the only subject I study that I dislike, many people I know either studied or study many subjects they really don't like, but continued them purely for grades, just like I am with Electronics.

My Music BTEC is fairly relaxed for most parts. I can easily keep up with deadlines we're set, even if i've lost the "get work done as soon as it's handed to you" work ethic I had last year.
I say mostly, because one practical assignment that is coming up very soon, in three weeks, has been sprung upon us.
Each of us in the class has to compose an original song of some sort, and perform it on our main instruments. However the issue is with things like this, we often have a bottleneck on certain players, namely drummers and bass players, as our class is mostly comprised of guitar players.
Over the Christmas holidays, our teacher told us to get a basic song written, which most of us have done. However when he set us our 3-4 week deadline to perform them, he has not taken in to account practice time whatsoever. Many of us still are still not entirely finished composing, I for example have sorted out my part, and almost finished the bass lines, however still need to write lyrics and also need to jam with a drummer so they can write the drum lines. I'm finding this hard as i've written a tricky song, with odd time signatures, so getting others to learn the bass lines and drum grooves is proving hard. I could blame myself for making it so complicated, however I had no clue we'd get such a short deadline
However even others with very plain simple songs still need do practice more, and write lyrics too. I expect even if they get it all sorted and practiced, they will only just be ready, or even be a bit underprepared and put on a sub-par performance.
The thing that really fucks me off is that this exact same thing happened last year. We had to play a selection of three cover songs, and we were steadily working on it, practicing with one another, however then he also gave us a deadline that really did not give us enough time at all.

Anyway, enough of my complaints and procrastination..i've work to be getting on with...