HSFY Blog

In this blog I will be giving a brief recap of the CELS 191 and CHEM 191 first semester papers. In each paper I will touch on the content, the labs, how the paper related to NCEA and high school, study techniques that I used and my overall opinion of the paper. CELS 191: Content: This paper can be split up into 4 main blocks you could say: 1)      Cell Structure and Diversity:  -         Three domains of life, endosymbiosis. -         Carbohydrates, lipids, proteins and nucleic acids and their roles and functions in the cell. -         Plasma membrane and transportation mechanisms, membrane proteins. -         Endomembrane system, bulk transport processes, lysosomes. -         Cytoskeleton structure and function, cell junctions and extracellular matrix. - ...

First-Year Residential Hall Experience In this blog, I am going to go over my first-year experience living in a hall (Arana). This is purely my opinion and is probably very subjective and is not how all students feel. I remember when I was halfway through year 13 and I was considering Otago as an option for university. This meant I had to make a decision based on my living condition. There are two main options open to students that choose to move away from home in their first year, you can either flat or you can move into a hall of residence. I chose the hall lifestyle purely based on my wants and needs.  I wanted to be independent but not entirely independent and this is where I thought a hall would be the perfect transition year. I wanted to get out and meet new people, I wanted to make new friends and being in a structured social environment like a hall was perfect for me. I have heard stories of some of those who have flatted in their first year and completely love...

My HSFY Experience To preface this, I’ll split this blog into 4 main parts: before, semester one, semester two and after. This will hopefully give you a good grasp of how my mentality changed throughout the year and things I did to adjust and adapt. Before: Coming out of high school I didn’t really know what I wanted to do, I had two options by the end of year twelve, to do engineering in Canterbury or to do health science (biomed) at Otago or Auckland. Throughout my year 13 I took statistics, biology, chemistry, physics and PE, (took calculus in year 12), and it made me realise how much I didn’t really like the mathematics aspect of school. So, with the engineering pathway closed I looked more into the health science fields in which by the end of year 13 led me to apply to the University of Auckland and the University of Otago for their first-year biomedical sciences and health science programs respectively. I’m thinking of making a separate blog about why I chose O...