Mixed emotions.

So after finishing Masters (for good hopefully), I've been having mixed emotions about life.

I've started the long process of job hunting after having a 2 week break - could say I was just savouring the last weeks of freedom that I might never experience again once I start working. I've done applications online, been searching for positions, doing some interview prep etc. Surprisingly for myself personally, I'm not stressed at all about finding a job, I'm not really in a difficult position financially as these days I don't really have anything to buy for myself. I get paid peanuts at my part time job just so I can save it or use it to see friends, the boyfriend or buy things that need replacing when they break (i.e. that overly expensive hairdryer). So I feel completely and absolutely fine and in peace about getting a full time job in HR - I know it will come naturally with the amount of jobs I apply for.

But then there's this problem with my mum.

My parents are retired and my mum really wants me and my brother to work ASAP to provide for them. It's an Asian tradition in case anyone is reading this like "they want you to provide for them?? What about yourself???" I guess this is why traditional Asian parents push their children to study something like medicine or law - those high paying jobs so they can provide for them and buy a house for themselves. So even though my mum doesn't directly say to me "why aren't you job hunting?" every time she sees me sat on the sofa watching dramas or on my phone, I kinda feel the pressure of her judging me when I'm not physically doing anything that is related to job hunting. That's where the "stress" is coming from. I can't exactly tell her I believe that a job will naturally come to me with time as she'll perceive it as laziness.

I'm not going to lie though, I really enjoy having my own time everyday like this. I had doubts earlier about whether I am really ready to start taking a full time job. Sometimes I see it, but some other times I just can't imagine myself working yet, I feel like there's something else I need to do before I work.

Reaaaally thought about having pizza earlier but...

I'm trying my hardest to save up by only treating myself to 2 things a month (excluding pressies from the boyfriend teehee). So it works out as having around £100 to spend on food and things for myself per month. Gotta pay my phone bill as well as travel so realistically, it's about £60 to spend on myself (excluding food... so maybe £50 to spend on myself a month).

I've gotten quite good with budgeting ever since I got back from Corfu, I set myself a target to save back the amount I "borrowed" from my savings and it's actually going really well. Not judging anyone but I really don't know how people can have 0 savings at all and just live off the money they earn. I just feel really uncomfortable even though I have interest-free overdraft to fall back on, but everytime I hit even -£1 I feel really guilty about it. If you are constantly hitting overdraft now, what will happen when you don't get overdraft anymore? I'm glad my mum lectured me about the importance of saving up after my first year at uni (I went WAY overboard with spending, ended up with like £500 saved out of the £8k I had... FML).

So now whenever I buy something, I really think about whether I really want it or am I just impulse buying? Same goes for when my boyfriend offers to buy me something as well. Don't want to waste money on things to see it sitting in my room unused ever again. About the pizza today, I was really only going to have it if there was no alternative. My mum told me there was leftover rice so I made fried rice with it. I'm pretty proud of myself for not wasting money on pizza (would've been like £13) and using it to treat myself to something useful instead. It's damn difficult with a part time job especially but I really want to have the same attitude towards saving as I do now when I get a full time job.

Really want to start saving towards a deposit to move out with the boyfriend - that's pretty much our long term goal.

Bants.

So I went to watch The Inbetweeners Movie 2 the other day with the boyf as I had wanted to ever since it came out but I had my annoying project to complete so I couldn't.

It. Is. Hilarious.

Wouldn't say it's as good or funny as 22 Jump Street but it's pretty damn close. Not going to launch into some big review about the movie but if you're a fan of The Inbetweeners then definitely go watch it. Even if you've never seen the TV series or the first movie, still, go watch it. My boyfriend hasn't seen a single episode or the first movie and still enjoyed it. I'd really love to see a 3rd movie but idk if that will happen.

Subject of this post is bants.

A couple of years back when I was still a single-ready-to-mingle, I joined a dating website called BeautifulPeople.com - you've probably heard of this website somewhere on BBC or DailyMail (more likely Daily Mail since they always make articles on shit like this). But anyway, I joined for the bants because this dating website is not just anyone's dating website. No. It's only for the beautiful people of the internet. Does this mean I think I'm beautiful? Nope, not at all. Let me just explain how this website even works. In order to be eligible to join, you have to register a picture of yourself and members of the website RATE you in the space of 24 hours and if you pass a certain score, congrats, you're beautiful and welcome to the website, here's some champagne. I was just curious as to what is deemed beautiful by these people. I was accepted but I forgot what score I got, from then I thought I'd just play around with the website and see what happens.

IMO, the website is pretttttty damn creepy itself. Of course, I didn't join it hoping to bag some sexy hunky bachelor, I joined it out of pure curiosity and to see what all the fuss was about. The website shows you how many and who viewed your profile, you can send winks, smileys etc to people you like and message them (you have to subscribe and pay to use certain features like messaging so...). I didn't particular start fishing for people but I did have fun rating people (I rated everyone as beautiful btw, I wasn't there to judge people on looks, just there to see what kinda people join). Logged on a couple of weeks later to find my profile bombarded with creepy men spamming me with winks and about 4 messages (which I couldn't even read as I am not paying £8 to read 4 messages) and a bunch of guys RATING my profile picture. Ugh, the website was kinda revolting in some ways. There's an events section that's exclusive to members where they host parties for people wanting to meet other beautiful counterparts and hopefully find what they're looking for. I just hate this whole rating thing, why do people need to rate others on looks and shit like they're some product on a shelf? IDG the point of this website apart from beautiful people looking to make some beautiful babies.

The only thing I gained from this website was 1% of self confidence. Still, it's pretty bants when I come back to this website 2 years later, some of the pictures I had on there though, can't believe people thought they were... nice.

This Masters experience.

I'm finally done. Done with education, done with essays, done with all this stress around deadlines for handing in work.

It's been a really weird experience this year. In some ways, it's comparable to 3rd year of uni but in other ways it's completely different. Having changed field and university, it was like jumping into a new subject with no prior knowledge or background of what even HR is. Well, I had an idea it was just those people in companies that deal with CVs, payroll etc. I must admit that this year learning about HRM has been insightful, enriching and interesting in its own ways. But with its ups, there are also downs. I just wanted to talk about the course in general and the way I see Westminster teaches it. It's going to be quite critical because I had a long think about what I really hated about the way this university teaches these business masters.

So without all the waffle, the main issue I had was that the course is really geared towards people already working in HR. If I knew this beforehand, I probably wouldn't have done it there. Working for a company will make your whole degree at Westminster about 10x easier as you can participate in lectures more, base pretty much EVERY single piece of your coursework on your company and of course, pass with flying colours on your project because it's considered empirical and relevant to the course. If you don't, well you'll probably struggle and your work might even be unimpressive and uninteresting to lecturers because you're given a boring alternative coursework question to explore. Also, your project might be dull and uninteresting because you'll have to base it on a sector or get into contact with an organisation to help you - basically it'll be tough collecting data and you'll have about 100 methodological problems and might not even break the 60 mark because of these reasons. That's the way I was made to feel anyway. People working in HR and are funded by their companies to study this course (kinda explains why it costs £10,000 to study it) are advantaged in some ways. I've also heard that lecturers tend to favourite these group of part-time evening students that come after work to study because they contribute a lot more the in class discussions. In short, I just feel that whoever coordinated the course didn't think much about students that perhaps don't work in HR.

Second thing was the teaching delivered to us. Maybe my expectations were just high but coming from a top-ish university like Royal Holloway, I was expecting experts in the field of HR to teach but in the end I was taught by adults who just simply worked in HR for a number of years and went and completed a PhD in it afterwards. These people weren't well known in the literature of HR and some of them were just plain terrible at teaching. I had a lecturer that was absent for 70% of the course because she was ill. Of course I can't blame her for being ill but the person that covered her position didn't know a thing about the module and just taught out of the core textbook for the whole of the module. There could've been at least some communication between them no matter how bed-ridden she was. Lectures were ridiculously long as well, some of them did not even need to be so long. People were switched off by the 2nd hour so I don't really understand why lectures had to be 3 hours long. I felt like a lot of the time was taken through pointless in class activities and discussions. Again, most of these discussions seemed to benefit people that already work in HR because they were activities like "discuss with your group about your current organisational culture". I still remember the awkwardness from the table of people where none of them worked. Lecturers didn't even consider about those that didn't work and so they were just sat twiddling their thumbs until the end of discussion time. Wonderful.

I can't say I haven't learn anything from this course, although it was much more independent than undergraduate, I can say I was ready for it. I studied hard, read a lot, revised hard for exams like before, failed 2 pieces of coursework but still brought it back in the exam. It's been an eventful year because I've never actually failed anything before until masters. I guess it's the whole thought of "this degree costs £10,000" that makes you really work for it. But now it's over I feel a little bittersweet because I'm still going to be waiting for my degree classification and final project marks as well as having to attend the graduation. So I can't say I'm ready for the world of work yet, in fact I'm not. Just thinking about the future and applying for jobs scares me a little. People I used to go to school with have started working a long time ago but in my mind, I'm still in that school mode of studying, exams, coursework etc. Definitely going to find it difficult to adjust when I do start working, but hey, this is life right? Life has got to start at some point right?

I'm excited for the future... Working, saving up, moving out, getting married, having children, watching my children grow up. But I can already imagine there's going to be lots of humps and bumps on that road and I'm scared at the same time.

Hectic month.

If anyone actually stalks this blog, sorry for not blogging this past month. 

It's been sort of a rollercoaster for me as I started off in July writing my project and collecting questionnaire responses (oh I will rant about this soon), then I decided to leave my project half completed and jetted off to Corfu with my friends and boyfriend at the end of July and came back nice and brown at the beginning of August and launched straight into my project again and here I am now still doing this project with the deadline looming. 

So let's start from July, not sure if I've rambled on about this before but I possibly have the worst project supervisor in the whole world of education. I don't even care if she reads this somehow because I would love to let her know how utterly shite she is at doing her job as a supervisor. She doesn't answer emails promptly even though she knows how close my deadline is. At our meetings she offers her supposedly unwavering support for me because she knows the struggles I've been through from failing my proposal and not being able to start my project nice and early because I didn't even have a solid research question until July - but I have yet to see much support from her apart from answer my emails about meeting up. She feeds me useless information that I already know and doesn't offer to help with analysing my results together or even trying to explain to me what my methods of analysis are and how it relates to my question. I prepare well for these meetings, printing out 17 pages of SPSS output ready to discuss with her but she just rambles on about my methods and my progress and how "behind" I am (I'm actually not that behind in comparison to others in my course) and I fail to get anything productive out of the meeting. Anyway, long story short, I've ended up having to read about 100 different articles on factor analysis to try and draw some sort of pattern between my research question and the method because she wouldn't let me change my method of analysis as she deems it's "way too late to think that I have the wrong analysis method" (how hard is it to run a regression or another analysis on SPSS?). But finally, I've gotten somewhere at least in terms of analysis and interpretation with 0 help from my useless supervisor. 

As you might know, I was collecting responses via questionnaire - it's literally the hardest thing to do if you're not choosing a demographic that is widely available, let me tell you that. Despite all the worries and tears and blood and sweat from me trying to get the relevant people to answer my questionnaire, I got 75 responses which is more than I expected. Ran analyses and it was just about the acceptable level for sample size. I was overjoyed, could literally dance-around-the-room-by-myself-for-30 minutes type of overjoyed. Hurdle 1 of this project was surpassed. So then it got to the analysis part, I literally had a mental breakdown the day before yesterday because I had no idea how my research question can be answered by this method of analysis, must've spent 10 hours trawling through the internet for an answer. Stopped by a statistics forum for help and some guy started ridiculing my use of statistical language and claimed I was "lacking understanding" and "perhaps I should read more on factor analysis before attempting it", man fuck you. Seriously, I'm at a stats HELP FORUM for HELP, I never claimed I understood factor analysis or the language associated with it, I was asking for explanations and advice not whether I'm using statistical language correctly or not. Jeez. This is why I hate people. Internet people. 

Anyway, some nice guy managed to explain to me what I wanted to know and then he suggested using a different type of factor analysis (I knew there was 2 but the other one needs a special program that I didn't have). Tried using this program called R and I literally uninstalled it the second a blank white text/code box came up when I ran it. As if I have time to learn coding on top of finishing my project. Found a simpler one called AMOS and it involves drawingggg! I loved it, thought it was great fun and once you draw the diagram you just click calculate and it gives you all the stats and diagrams. Awesome. Then I had trouble understanding what the figures meant and just ended up changing my research question around to suit the method. Sigh. Now my life feels 40% easier than before. Now I'm FINALLYYYY at the discussion chapter of my project and have decided to call it a day. 

Wish I could've used this post to talk about my holiday in Corfu but I just had to get all this ranting out before I continue my project. All this pent up anger towards my useless supervisor, all this worry about failing my project, falling at the last hurdle, not meeting the deadline, spending days on reading about factor analysis rather than progressing with the word count on my project was definitely NOT good for my mental stability. 

Other than that, I welcome myself back to Blogger :) 

Write up rambles.

It's currently 5:50am and I haven't slept yet.

Believe me, I have actually attempted to fix this damn sleeping pattern of mine but I think my nocturnal instincts are definitely stronger. At least I'm being productive at this time of day and I'm proud to say that after weeks of procrastination, I've finally begun the write up to my final piece of essay/project/academic writing EVER. Just thought I'd do a bit of blogging before I sleep, I've done around 1000 words out of 10,000 so that's an achievement I guess. I'm 1/10th of the way there, woo hoo. It actually pains me to think that if I did 1000 words a day, this project could be completed in 10 days - but obviously that won't happen.

I've actually been stressing over very minor things recently. For instance, for this project, I have to collect data from a questionnaire - never done it before but I've been heavily stressed because I'm worried about insufficient sample sizes and failing my project because of it. Maybe it's the way my supervisor worded things but she said I need 100 responses as if 100 was the minimum needed to pass this project. Having looked at the mark scheme and constantly convinced myself that sample size is not going to determine whether I fail or pass, I've come to the conclusion that at the end of the day, I'm going to have to work with what I got whether it be 20 responses or 50. I guess I'm just scared of falling at the last hurdle and because this project is so heavily weighted I feel so much pressure. Also because this is a "masters project" I feel like I have to produce something that is worthy of publication. Sigh. So much unnecessary stress right now.

I mean, my topic was chosen on a whim because of the tight deadline but it's not as if I have no interest in it... I'm just slightly annoyed at the way this masters course has been organised, it really feels like it's suited to people working in HRM already - I've probably said it before but they use things like "organisational focus" and "coursework based on organisation" as means of assessment - it's just not possible for someone like me who doesn't even work in the industry. As well, the criteria for this assessment has to be organisation or industry based - I've chosen the education industry but I'm struggling to find mothers working in education to fill out my questionnaire as mine is about maternity policies and flexible working, they've made me choose such a tight demographic that I'm really struggling to even imagine myself with 100 responses. I've actually gone and sent an email to my supervisor asking her if I will fail if I don't get 100 responses LOL.

Anyway, I should really get some sleep and stop worrying, I'm satisfied with the amount I've done for today so tomorrow will be a new day for me.

And if by chance there are any mothers working in education in the UK reading this, please fill out my questionnaire :) https://www.surveymonkey.com/s/H5MJSYZ

Busy week.

It's been a while since I've had a busy busy week. I feel good because it's been too long that I've sat on my arse most of the week doing nothing but working on my project (still less than 10% done...) I've recently returned from a short trip to Newquay with my family. Not sure why they chose Newquay but it was quite nice, had lovely sunshine everyday apart fro the last - we chose to see some limestone caves in Torquay before heading back to London.

I feel like I always blog when I get started on my project. I'm shitting myself for tomorrow because I'm meeting my supervisor to talk more about my project. I just hope this new found idea (found like, 2 hours ago) holds well and that she likes it. I pretty much had a lightbulb moment when I was stressing out because every single idea I had for a research was falling apart from insufficient research, someone already having done it, or I'm too constrained by time and resources to do it. But finally, I think I have something that is actually possible to do in the short time I have. It's literally struck me that I have less than 2 months to get my data together and write up the 8000 words. I'm even contemplating on paying SurveyMonkey to distribute my questionnaire before I go on holiday so I can come back to a lot of responses and get analysing. That's how serious life has gotten. I just hope luck is with me tomorrow because luck really hasn't been on my side this week. I keep getting stressed over little things, worrying over everything, being attacked by evil mosquitos and now today, I found out I have to do some long ass routine to clean the inflammation out of my left eye. Can you believe it's been over 2 months since I've been seen by a specialist. Also, Tesco pharmacy really pissed me off with the amount of time they took to give me my damn prescription. Rant rant rant.

Anyway, I just hope for something positive tomorrow. I just want to get started on this project so I can relax a little and actually have a bit of summer to enjoy you know?