Ironing out a bumpy start

 Today, I've been trying to catch up as I'm still kind of behind but I also planned out my experiment a bit more and presented that to my tutor because so far I've just been rambling at him. 

I've organised my calendar and to do list and I laid out what each of the assignments are (because one of them asks for your knowledge about qualitative methods which prevents you from skipping everything that isn't experiment based). This has helped me visualise the module better and realise what I need to do and by when.

It's tricky working on a very difficult iCMA, planning your experiment, keeping up with the online weeks and the book chapters and working on assignments at the same time. As TMA 1 started in week 2, it put me about 3 weeks behind with the online material because I spent all of my time on the assignment! This is a very time and work intensive module, that's for sure. I don't know how people do this module alongside another and also work at the same time. I think I'd definitely have a meltdown.

Things didn't work out with my initial tutor and thankfully the OU allowed me to swap to a more experienced tutor who has been so much more helpful.

The first tutor was so unhelpful and unavailable. Their complete lack of professionalism in a tutorial also said a lot about them. All responses would be just short 5 word responses. They missed a phone appointment with me which was the icing on the cake for me because that was my one glimmer of hope that they would actually help me. They didn't even consider calling or emailing me to apologise or rearrange.

I've already been anxious about this module; doing my own research/project was one of the things that initially put me off doing a degree in the first place! So to have such a hopeless and unhelpful tutor made it all so much worse! But the people at the OU were very helpful and apologetic and seemed to care about how I was doing in the module. They even suggested doing a special circumstances form for TMA 1.

Working on TMA 1 was a bit of a nightmare. I guess I felt thrown in at the deep end and unprepared because the assignment week began in week 2. I felt generally unmotivated and then became even more unmotivated by my tutor's lack of support and seemingly their own lack of motivation for the module. Whenever I asked a question, they wouldn't answer it and would ask for a draft which I didn't have at the time. When I sent them an outline with questions, they just said my outline looked fine, no answers! After weeks of communication (took some time to reply each time), they didn't answer any of my pretty simple questions. So yeah, I felt completely unsupported and even more stressed than I should've been!

After submitting what I felt was absolute garbage, my new tutor very generously awarded me 80% which I'm so happy with. I feel like it's not worth putting a special circumstances form in tbh with a score like that. By my calculations, I only need a pass 2 in this module to complete with a 1st class degree so hopefully I can do that! I need to get over 70% in each assignment to do that and as I've generally worked higher than that in previous modules, I'm feeling comfortable so far.

I can't wait for all of this to be over now. Uni is so hard, even more so when it's spread over 5 years. My motivation has plummeted and I just want to get it done now so I don't have to deal with uni deadlines again!