Academic Writing Skill

As a graduated student with a master's degree in Computer Science, I am supposed to have good academic writing skill especially my thesis was in English. However, I found that the presessional course taught me a lot of things which I should know when I was doing my previous master's degree and I might save a lot of time. Although I already knew some of them via trying by myself and reading a lot of articles, I still benefited a lot from the systematic way.

As my IELTS score meet the requirement of 6 week pre-sessional course, I was not so happy when they asked me to take 10 week pre-sessional course because my speaking score was only 5.0. Now, it's good that I took the 10 week course since I will not know most things told here even I got IELTS 7.0, and they are certainly very critical while I will be doing my next Master's degree in Accounting.

New furniture - Sofa

This flat we are living in was unfurturtured. We had to buy our own bed, table and chairs. We considered to buy a sofa but we only got cash and my bank account still had problems at that time. This week, I got my bank account working and my debit card also worked well. We decided to buy a two-seat sofa in IKEA, since sitting in a sofa is much more comfortable than sitting on a hard chair and we ere very tired after class everyday.

I believe that the main reason of my tireness is long walking time. Everyday I spent at least 1 hour to walk between the university and home. Every 2 or 3 days we may go shopping for food and we walk more.

IKEA told me that the sofa will be delivered on Sunday. It's good that they can deliver on weekend as I canot stay home to wait them on weekday.

2011/7/31

Review of Engliash Learning Program

In the Language Resource Center, I tried a funny program: President For A Day. Actually, it's a game, in which I play a role as a president in a virtual African country. There are several stages and I have 3 special advisers who will give their opinions in each stage. After listening to their suggestions, I have to make a decision on each stage. If I make a good decision, I can go on to the next stage, or my people may start an uprising and may kill me. The stages are related to the political and economics situations in the real world. The player need to choose between developing modern industries and keeping simple agriculture, or make a decision to cut off public expense in health and education to lower down the debt risk. While listening to the advisers, I not only can practice listening but also can learn political and economics phrases. In addition, the advisers have quite different accents which helps me be familiar with more accents. As there are only 10 stages, I think it's worth to take 1 hour to play this game.

2011/7/31