July 17

This morning I slept in again. At 1:30 pm I had my first lecture in Data Analysis in Science. At 3:30 pm I had my second lecture, also in Data Analysis. It's weird how they have the lectures for a class sort of "all in a row". I'm used to the same time on Monday, Wednesday, and Friday for each class, but here I have two lectures on Monday and one lecture on Tuesday for one class, and then a tutorial at a time of my "choice", and then I'm done with that class for the week. I liked the professor. She is a physicist from South Africa, and seemed like a really smart woman. She seems like an easygoing type of lady also, and sounds like she cares about us learning what we're gonna be taught. Today she pretty much just explained to us some concepts and definitions behind understanding statistics and data analysis in science and talked about what we are going to be doing. At Mansfield, a comparable course is biostatistics (which is what this is going to transfer in to fill). There are two MU professors that typically teach biostats, and they usually use their one preferred data analysis computer program exclusively. A nice advantage to this class that I learned of today, is that we will be using how to use all three statistics programs this semester, which undoubedtly will give me an advantage for future job applications over those who only know how to use one program. Yay.

It turns out the stupid class that I was going to take for my my stupid "heatlh and fitness" general education credits isn't going to be an option for me. So I looked around online and found several possibilities for alternative classes to take, and I think I am going to try to take Introduction to Exercise Science. I am sure that this will be sufficient to fill the requirement, and it sounds like it will be an interesting course. I'm going to go up to the international office tomorrow to get it all sorted out.

I registered online today for a 5K trail run in Canberra on July 29th. This morning I ran for 24 minutes. I'm going to try to run about 5 days a week to get back into shape. I'm excited about doing races again, and I'm looking forward to seeing where I'm at in two weeks when I do that race. Lately I've also heard some things about a big race in Sydney called "City to Surf", so I looked up more info online today. It turns out it is a 14K race (about 8.7 miles), and it starts in the city of Sydney and goes through several suburbs then finishes on one of Sydney's most famous beaches, Bondi beach. Apparently I need to send in "proof" of my race times from a 10K or longer race in the past year to be considered for the "preferred" and "group A" starting sections at the start line. I think I'm going to try to find an entry form tomorrow (supposed to be in the newspaper that sponsors the race), and then I'll give them my boilermaker 15K run time from last year (~58 minutes) and hope I get a good starting position. This race is a huge event, and I found out today that in recent years the number of entrants has exceeded 50,000 people! After finding this out, I must say that I definitely want to get into a starting group up close to the front of the pack. I don't want to have any more than a couple thousand people starting in front of me, because it's a big pain to weave and try to pass slow people when you start farther back. No matter where I start though, I'm sure it will be a fun event, and definitely worth it. I have almost a month to train until that race, so I better start increasing my distance soon. It'll be interesting to see how I do in the 5K so I can try and guage my performance in the city to surf a couple weeks later.

Not much else going on. If I get enrolled into my exercise science class, I'll have three classes to attend tomorrow.