Hello there, Hivers 👋
I am a final-year student in his final semester of university. And no one told me I would have to work my ass off to survive this final semester if I wanted to come out of it well, at the very least.
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This semester is packed with activities here and there and projects from different courses. I also have the normal project of a final-year student hanging there somewhere, and I am feeling really behind on that.
I also have some programs I am volunteering to be part of the organizers since it is my final semester. I am hoping to engage in a lot of things I have not tried since being a student at my university.
First, I have my final year project, I am working on modelling stock returns of the all-share index on the Nigerian Stock Exchange, and I am using R for my analysis. This topic is a really interesting one, which I was lucky to be given by my project supervisor.
I picked up R during my third year and started learning. I did this because a lecturer of mine told us it was a useful tool in the world of actuaries. And as an ambitious student, I went on to learn R.
Coincidentally, I was looking to land a tech role and start earning as a student, so I took a course learning data science. I could have learned data science with Python, as it is popular amongst data scientists, but I chose to learn with R because it was an option and I have always wanted to learn R since my lecturer spoke about it.
And so, I learned the data science skill with R. Data science is closely related to my course, actuarial science, and so it was the best skill to pick up and learn. It helped prepare me for the world of a data scientist and the world of an actuary.
All this long talk is to say that my decision to learn R in my third year was a great decision because now I can apply my knowledge to my final year project. And I am glad. I really love my course and I hope it works out. Sometimes reality just sets in, and I wonder if I would be able to practice actuarial science.
Other than my final year project, I have two other projects on my list for this final semester. We have a course called CSR. In this course, we have been given an assignment to work on a CSR project. We should do something within our community as corporate social responsibility and report on it.
This is also an interesting project, and I would love to give it my all and learn as much as I can from it, but I have so little time. A semester is less than four months long, and we are down to nine, if not eight weeks.
Let me not get to the part of where expenses wan choke me, asper final year brethren. These projects will cost me, and I am not ready for them 😩. My budget for this final year is like all my previous years combined.
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The third project I am working on from my course work entails analyzing a multinational company and writing a report / presentation on our findings. It is a group work, and I am the group leader 😩. It is not because I am so smart and serious like that o, it is just because I was in the first class and now I am a group leader with the responsibility of my teammates, who don't strike me as serious.
Well, this, as you would expect, I also find this interesting, but timeeeee, time is the issue. But still, I will try my best and do them well. I will put in my best and outsource anything I won't be able to meet up with all by myself.
Then there is the program I volunteered for, AIS (Actuarial Intelligence Summit). It is a sensitization program for students at my school who want to explore the actuarial career. This will add to my volunteer experience as I leave school. Plus, it pertains to the career I wish to pursue, actuarial science. So, it is going to be a relevant experience,
We would also be having a lot of activities, being that we are finalists. We would have our final year week, inter-house games, and deans' games; we already had our HOD games. And it is going to be coupled with hall weeks of different halls. Second semester in the university of Lagos is always packed with activities. If one isn't goal-driven, they can easily be thrown off track.
So, my semester is packed with all these activities, but I am sure to not participate in all of them, but I will try to participate in some. And I just wanted to share this with you guys.
Thank you for reading my blog, guyss.
Cheers 🥂