hi! my name is daniel, and to be honest, i never thought of starting a vce journal. i’ve read countless amounts on atar notes, and i was like ‘eh that could never be me.’ but i really wanted to capture my vce journey, because i know it is going to be an extraordinarily bumpy road that i’m not sure i’m quite ready to ride. i’m in year 12, the class of 2024, and i wanted to just document the ups and downs of the year (maybe more downs that ups but that’s ok).

my subjects
well i’m doing five subjects next year; four at my in-person school and one through virtual school victoria. at my in-person school, i’m studying english (compulsory, although i would have enjoyed doing english language), general maths, business management, and psychology. through virtual school victoria, i’m studying extended investigation (explanation below).

english — i love english. i don’t care what people say about hating english and wanting to die when they go to english class, i absolutely enjoy english (despite my friends correlation between me loving english and being white 😭). when i finish high school, i want to study media + communications and creative writing at unimelb. kind of ironic how english is my lowest performing subject (mid 70’s to low 80’s on a good day), but i don’t like analysing books, and why the author chose medea to be a child-killer (yes our school chose medea for year 11 it was incredibly boring). i enjoy the creative component of english, which is why i am SUPER grateful for the new english study design where we get to craft our own creative responses, because i always do super well on those in my english sac’s. enough about english…

general math — i was planning on dropping general in year 12, because it was too easy, but then i realised “why drop it because it’s easy… it is just an opportunity to get a decent study score.” (for background information, i was going to drop this to continue with geography but not enough people from 1/2 wanted to do it so it got cancelled. then i had to chose between biology and general, and i really really despise biology [a story in itself, i might write about it later] so i chose general). i did well this year, i heard the 3/4 course is almost a copy and paste of units 1/2, so that will be interesting.

business management — HELP i will never understand how people tend to do so bad in this subject. i never dropped below a 90 on my sac’s (except the one time i realised that my teacher marked me an extra mark that when removed, it would’ve been an 87, so i didn’t tell her because what’s loyalty T-T). i feel that business is the kind of subject that where you put the effort in, you get the reward, and i do all the notes and the textbook questions assigned but i never really went out of my way to study, and still managed 90’s-100’s. definitely will change that approach next year because i’ll get lazy if i don’t. but i DO have the same teacher next year as i did this year, which is thrilling because she is great, but changed her teaching style during orientation where peoples tests grades dropped for the worse because it sucked (thank god i’m an independent learner ESPECIALLY for business).

psychology — psych has always been the stand out science for me. i feel like studying why people do what they do and how the mind works entails so many fascinating connections to what i already know, and to branch off that is just something i enjoy. i did great this year in psychology with my decent 75 year old teacher, and then she went on leave and i got an even better teacher who was by far more engaging than her.

extended investigation — as mentioned, i’m doing this through vsv, and took a LOT of convincing for my school to let me do it (gotta love having a kick-ass mum). i’m really excited, because not only isn’t there an exam, i get to look into stuff i really enjoy and it’s mostly self paced meaning i can do it in my own time… AND IT SCALES DECENTLY TOO!! basically EI as it is abbreviated is a subject where you write a thesis on a topic you have researched for the whole year, and then present it as an oral presentation to a panel of VCAA assessors. helps build critical thinking, but i want to improve my writing skills.

why i despise biology
biology this year was such a roller coaster, because i had the worst teacher imaginable. like if he had to teach to survive, he’d be a pile of ashes right now. i did incredibly bad in his class, because i had no idea what i was doing 95% of the time, and he has this mindset where he thought he was always right, despite marking our unit 1 exams wrong and screwing up multiple other marking on sac’s. BUT HE LEFT AFTER SEMESTER 1, and i got a biology teacher who has a PhD in something (finished on an A, which is like 25% more than what i finished on with the bad teacher)

goals
i guess i should also talk about my goals for the year. study score wise, i am hoping to achieve:

english — 30-35
general — nothing below a 40
business management — nothing below a 45
psychology — 35-40
extended investigation — 35-40
after school, i am DEFINITELY taking a gap year because school is exhausting me, before i study media + communications and creative writing at unimelb (need an 88 atar i think that it’s achievable).

a little bit more about me…
i love to talk, if you couldn’t tell by this massive first post. i don’t know, i’ve always just been so opinionated and love to talk about almost anything.

i love music, it is literally what keeps my heart beating healthy. i listen to varying genres, but i listen to conan gray (top 0.001% of listeners this year with him being over 1/3 of my overall streams), taylor swift (who i didn’t get tickets to because of bots and fake fans), enhypen, paramore, sabrina carpenter, gracie abrams, newjeans, mcr, etc etc
concerts are something else i really enjoy, despite being to only two. i saw conan gray in 2022 which was MAGNIFICENT and then paramore (opening night) in november 2023. my goal is to definitely go to more concerts after year 12, because live music >>
i also love reading, and have literally bought 55 books in 18 months. i was banned from buying books for my birthday (my parents still bought me 2 lol) and for christmas (i’m getting 6 haha). i just love living vicariously through other people in made up worlds… maybe it’s a bad coping habit but oh well.
i’m always up for music and book suggestions, as i am always running low on either, and there is only so many times i can listen to taylor swifts catalogue of music over and over. apologies for the lengthy introduction but i love to talk and that will never change. bye for now!