Hello, so recently i've gone through the grades of people like Einstein and
Nikola Tesla and on those videos some of you asked
that I show some of my own grades and I thought well today as a bit of a
special video to celebrate passing 500k subscribers that I would do
just that. So I'm going to show you through the transcript I have here
of my time at the University of Canterbury which is where I did my
undergraduate degree and it was a Bachelor of Science
majoring in physics and maths. I'll put the university grading scale up on the
screen so you can have a little look it goes
from an A+ which means you got a mark of between 90
and 100 for the course all the way down to an E and i think
anything above a D would be considered a passing grade.
There are then a couple of special grades such as P
and F which are usually for things that aren't worth credit or are considered
differently to an actual course. So let's start with 2013 which was my
first year of uni, and the year is broken up into two main
semesters and to be considered a full-time student
you would take four courses in each semester, each
course is worth 15 points so if you keep that up over three years
you would have the 360 points that you need
to graduate. Now i'll highlight the courses that i took
during my first semester which is when I was 17.
I got two A+ an A and an A- now this was probably one of
my best semesters at uni because i was fresh out of high
school, i was motivated i was pretty hard working
and i was fairly organized so much so that i
do remember actually reading and studying
some of the lecture materials before showing up to the lecture
which is a good practice but unfortunately not something that i was
able to keep up for very long. I took courses in math, physics
astrophysics and computer science. Now of those the
computer science course was definitely the most difficult for me
and i think that's because i had never encountered computer science before.
This class was my first introduction to any of the concepts of coding.
So first semester was fine but second semester would go on to probably be my
worst semester of my degree it was one where i felt stressed a lot
of the time, i was disorganized, i would show up to
lectures late. I had this one class that i really hated
which was math 170 and maybe i hated it because i didn't
really have any friends in that class or i don't know why but i
remember when the exam time came around i just
felt like i couldn't focus. I couldn't focus on studying
i showed up to the exam and asked someone as we were waiting outside the
door to be let in, to explain Bayes Theorem to me.
You know that's how last minute i was kind of panicking about this
whole semester. At the same time i was taking part in this university business
competition and trying to launch a startup and i was
also working on some other projects to do with video interviews and
things for the physics department. A couple of notes is that this academic
writing assessment wasn't a course it was just
a little test we had to do to prove we were proficient at
writing and this astro 211, the two indicates that it was a
second year course whereas all of the others would be considered first-year
courses so that's kind of reflecting their difficulty.
So let's move on to my second year and you may notice here that i've taken
10 courses instead of the usual eight and there's no real reason why i've done
that and in fact i ended up getting a lot more
points and i needed to graduate so you wouldn't
do this as a strategic option i guess but the extra courses that i added were
ones that i really wanted to take and so i felt prepared to do extra work
in both semesters to be able to take them.
I did all the standard courses in maths and physics
and then i added this science communication
third year course which i guess kind of makes sense to what i do now, i was
interested in science communication back then and i also added on this
first year computer science course which was a follow-up to the one i'd taken in
first year and i kid you not i decided to take that
course just because i had a dream about it.
I had a dream about one day before the deadline to sign up
for courses that i had taken this course and that,
I don't know, there was just this feeling that it was the right thing to do
so i woke up and i enrolled in it but i actually was really glad about that
decision. It was a course all about sort of
algorithms and data structures and in the internship that i did at the
end of this second year it was in an observatory and we were
processing images of galaxies, the skills that i learned in that class
were pretty much the most useful thing i'd learned
all year in terms of you know how to process these images using code.
The grades this year were pretty good i got quite a few A+
and no B's which i was happy about. Of these courses the hardest one
was probably Analysis and Groups MATH240.
but the one that required the most work was probably PHYS285
Experimental Physics which i managed to get an A+ in
but it took a lot of work because it was a lab course where every week we would
do like a three hour experiment and then every week have to write up a
long lab report and send that in. It would be about 10 or so
pages with all the code and everything and
yeah i guess a few of the weeks of this course i did have to pull an all-nighter
to get that lab report done but yeah i managed to do well in it in
the end. Probably my favorite course this year was MATH203 linear algebra
which i also got an A+ in and i don't know it was just a concept i
enjoyed, i thought the lectures were nice everything sort of fit together and
made sense in a way and yeah it was an area of math that
i felt like i was good at. During 2014 i did still have a lot of
stuff going on outside class, i was the vice president
of the physics society that year and still working on i guess lots of little
science communication projects but i think compared to the the previous
semester things were a lot more calm. I was in general less stressed and a bit
more organized. My third and final year i again made the
odd choice to take ten courses instead of eight
and this time i did all of the usual courses
in maths and physics and then i added on this PSYCH106 course which i was able
to take under this program the uni had called the Vice
Chancellor's Award where people were able to take
a course outside of their usual program, for me that would be outside of physics,
and take it without having to pay for it and they would only be marked either
pass or fail so it wouldn't really affect their gpa
and they would be able to have a try of something a little bit new. So i
took this psychology course and yeah i kind of enjoyed it. My hardest
course this semester was MATH302 partial differential equations which
i got another B in which again i wasn't happy about but
um yeah that course i don't know i just
found it really hard. The mid-term test of this course i
actually got 50% on. After getting that really bad
midterm result i was like man i'm going to do terribly
in this course i should withdraw from it because i've got way
more than enough points that i need to graduate
i don't even need to take it. But i went to the admin of the university and they
said i was one day too late to be able to withdraw from the course so i just
had to stay in it and i guess i'm glad i did there would
have been no real benefit to me pulling out of things even if i'm going
to get a low grade which might look bad on my transcript
well at the time i didn't think i'd be showing it to thousands of people on the
internet but i guess it was better to just keep
it and learn the things i did learn in that course than trying to run away from it.
That year i also did dynamical systems
which i really liked it's one of my favorite courses but
definitely the course i loved the most of my whole degree
was this course MATH380 and it was Mathematics in Perspective
it was basically a history of mathematics class
it was in this course that i first read A Mathematician's Apology
and the first time i encountered Babylonian
ancient mathematics and ideas there. I just
really loved everything in this course. One of the lecturers even gave us a
challenge to present a mathematical poem to the
class and at this time i'd already been
performing some mathematically themed poems
at open mic nights around the city and so that was like
right up my alley for an assignment that was exactly the things i
love doing. And i was quite proud of myself for
getting a few A+ in subjects that i'd found were quite
difficult including the Advanced Experimental Physics, the
Classical Mechanics and Symmetry Principles
and the Advanced Electromag and Materials course.
And so that was more than enough to graduate with a Bachelor of Science
first major physics second major mathematics.
And i have at the end here some academic awards that i had while i was a student.
I did also receive the award for a top physics student at the end of my third
year. And one of the reasons i came to this
university was that i got the Aurora Scholarship in Astronomy
and that was something that you applied for coming out of school
and it allowed you to go to the Mt. John
University Observatory and do like experience
in observing and astronomy and i even got to
take a trip to some overseas astronomy sites as part of that so that was
really great and yeah i'd done quite a lot of astronomy stuff
including at my local astronomy club as a high school student so that definitely
helped in applying for that. After this degree i
moved to Australia and went to the ANU where i did my
honours year and started my PhD and i guess i've never shown these
grades to anyone except having to apply for honors and PhD
and since then you know they haven't really been needed at all
and um i guess i probably didn't need to worry
so much about what they looked like in that case because
no one really is going to be looking back to these grades
as you you know finish higher degrees and and go into the workforce.
Although i'm in the unique position of showing them now to thousands of people
which probably would have been my worst fear when i got some of those
grades i didn't like. But yeah i guess it's important
though to mention that i spent a lot of time stressing
about how these grades would look and how they would be perceived and
maybe linking my self-worth to these grades
which is not a good thing to do i don't regret getting good grades though
because it meant that i was trying really hard at these courses and i was
actually learning a lot of things. While i was a student i didn't really go
out, i didn't drink, i didn't party and you might consider
that to be a sacrifice in striving for good grades
to me i didn't really see it as a sacrifice because
those weren't things that i was interested in or would enjoy
anyway but there were certain sacrifices for sure that i had to make
just to my own life to try this hard and to
want to want to get these grades that looked good. I also wouldn't
consider my efforts here to be wasted now that i'm not doing my PhD and
now that i'm making youtube videos. Maybe one day i will return to the phd
but it's not something that i really
feel is right for me at the moment and i don't consider these grades
having gone to waste because i can always take that
option to go back or i can just take this knowledge and
experience that i got in the process and use it to do other things.
In the meantime you can expect to see me covering the grades and other documents
from people who are much more impressive than myself
and a big thank you for helping me to reach 500k
subscribers it's an awesome milestone and
definitely every one of you who has subscribed to the channel
has helped me get there. A big thank you as always
to my Patreon supporters and a special shout out to
today's Patron Cat of the Day who is looking awfully reptilian, Thor.
Thanks for watching and i hope to see you next time :)