Yoshi's Blog

Since I need to have an English exam for applying the qualification of being an exchange student, I choose the incoming TOEIC exam to try. I searched some related articles discussing the exam, and many people say that having an mocking exam is very important. It may improves the final score with 100+. I think it is possible since mocking the exam can make tester more familiar with the style of the questions. But currently I don't have a plan to do a mock exam. I already have two English books, one is Longman survey of English grammar, and the other one is Longman English core words. Although they do not directly focus on TOEIC exam, the content of the books is still good to improve the basic English ability. For many daily-using words, I found that my vocabularies are still too few since I only read technical papers in computer science. It is not a good news, especially for those exams on daily-conversation English (i.e., TOEIC). Come on, Yoshi! Spend more time on preparing the...

Before I decided to join the PhD program in my department, I had planned to be an exchange student abroad for broadening my research experience. I wonder how researchers in other countries work. But I am too passive, so now I even haven't ask any professor for a chance to be an exchange student. Now, I have so many tasks to do for preparing the opportunity, such as having an international certified English exam to prove that I have essential language ability. I have only less than ten days to prepare the exam, so I'm a little bit anxious in these days.  The good news is, the official doc does not mention that I need to pass a strict threshold. So what I need to do is do my best. Good luck to me.

The explosion of social network application has changed my life. The two most opened tabs of my browser are Facebook and Plurk (it's similar to Twitter). Sometimes I just refresh the screen to see if there is any update in the pages. I found that I spend too much time on surfing web pages. I try to reduce the time, but it is more difficult than I expected. Since many of my friends use Facebook, and once some pictures with their faces are tagged by others, my Facebook starting page always has 100+ unread messages. It is even impossible to catch up the updating speed of the pages of Facebook. The attacking of huge information confuses me. On one's hand, I like to see many messages from my friends. On the other hand, I don't like the feeling of being pushed by the information.