Exams, JSTS and and I’m back!

I’ve been quite busy for the past few weeks. As I said before disappearing off the blog, my exams were looming on the horizon. Now they’re in the rear-view mirror. I had 5 of them – Social Studies, English, Maths, Science and French, in the same order. Well, it would be useless to go into a full-out explanation for each one of them, because frankly, who cares? I’m done with them, and you don’t care either. But since I mentioned them, I’ll write one line about each one of them.

Social Studies involved a decent amount of rote learning, and I had a bit of trouble piecing together the answers when I was giving the exam. Geography might will be troublesome. English was a piece of cake. Studying for it involves going through the literature lessons and the writing skill formats. Maths was pretty smooth as well. Might have messed up one small question, can’t be too sure. In science, biology was smooth, and maybe a hiccup or two in physics and chemistry. French is an untold disaster. I’ll take the liberty of saying that I’m not alone in my class in saying this.

So much for the exams. The results are yet to come out, so, there’s a lull before the storm. Let me shift the attention to JSTS or the Junior Science Talent Search. I’m not sure if I mentioned it earlier, but I had given the JSTSE (E stands for Examination), and I cleared the first round. The second round involved an interview, which was today, on Wednesday. Didn’t go to school, the interview was at 2 PM.

Fastforward to the interview. First – Biology. The interviewer was a nice person, and we got along OK. He asked me about my strengths, then about where I was from, then about the Code Warriors. Then he got more into Bio. I messed up quite a few of them. Didn’t know about the Blue Revolution, which phylum mushroom belonged to and about some medicinal plants. In fact it was so bad, that in the end, he asked me how much I expected out of 10. I said I expected 3-4, because, truth be told, it was bad. He told me look at how much he had given me.

It was a 7. I was a bit dazed.

Then was physics. He was interested in how much I liked my school, because the guy before me, Shikhar had been asked a question like that. I said I did. Then he asked me how much I paid. Then he asked me how satisfied(?) I was with paying that much for the school. I said that the returns would be monumental compared with the initial investment. Cheesy, yet true… He then asked me some SI units – length, mass, time, luminosity, current. No probs. Then he asked me to provide the volume of a 1 cm side cube in m³. Easy. Then the difference between velocity and speed.

Chemistry, the interviewer was an slightly aged man. Very slowly closed the file after reading my name, and  very slowly took off his glasses and placed them on the folder. Hehe. He asked 3 simple questions. One about why there were so many carbon compounds. Another about fullerenes. And the last about the difference between isotopes and allotropes. The most simple one so far.

On a whole, I see no reason why I shouldn’t get through. Just the Bio might hold me back.