Nina Garbarino Senior Project

    Blog Day 11      I technically finished my senior project today because I hit the hours requirement! Looking at it now, 75 hours is a lot. I woke up this morning and got right to work doing some review on charting skills that needed to be relearned because I forgot over the weekend. This included courses including current and wind, I couldn’t remember when I had to do conversions and make triangles on the chart. I worked mainly in the Chesapeake Bay chart because it’s the area I’m least familiar with. When the questions tell me about a landmark, it’s hard to find where it is because I don’t know the area. After my morning session, I took a 100-question practice test on the rules of the road to make sure I hadn’t forgotten anything there. I printed some documents I needed to fill out and looked for help from fellow mariners on Reddit. I’ve found the r/merchantmarieners community to be very helpful when it comes to quick questions. I have so many random papers with my signature on it

Week 2 Reflection The time is really flying by, I can’t believe graduation is in less than a week. For the second week of senior project, I spent my time getting to the end of my course so I could start studying for my final exam. I spent the beginning of the week finishing up, learning about all the rules I have to know. I am so thankful that it’s over. Learning 38 different rules with sub-sections was so hard and I’m so proud of myself for being able to navigate and understand them. To keep these rules fresh in my mind, I have practice tests that I’m trying to take every day so I don’t forget everything. I think that the hardest part of this section was learning about all the different lights upon vessels. There are just so many possibilities of what something could be in the dark because of length and other variables. There’s only so much I can memorize, so the rest of it was intuition based. In the middle of the week, I started the navigation portion of my course, which was suppose

  Blog Day 10        I almost hit all my hours today! I decided to sleep in because I knew I had the time to do my work this afternoon. I started at noon and worked for four hours straight doing practice navigation problems. I got really frustrated at the end of my time block because I got a handful of questions wrong that I shouldn’t have. I’m starting to be too confident and make careless mistakes. For the next couple of days, I need to slow down and double-check all my work. I’m excited to spend the weekend studying and preparing for the express fest.  Today’s Hours: 4 Total Hours: 71.5

 Blog Day 9 I had a great day! I spent the entire morning finishing up my plotting module. I learned things like how to account for drift and current and dead reckonings. This was so annoying to learn but I put my airpods in and got it done. In the afternoon I did a lot of practice. I did multiple full questions with charting voyages in Block Island Sound, Long Island Sound and the entrance of the Chesapeake Bay. This wrapped up all of my course and I’m spending the next couple of days preparing for my final exam. Todays Hours: 7 Total Hours: 67.6

  Blog Day 8 Hey, blog. I had another successful day! Like I said in yesterday’s entry, I am starting the final portion of my course… hands-on navigation! I started my day by getting all my materials situated and my charts rolled out to be worked on. I first took a pretest to see how much I already knew. I did better than I expected on this and was excited about how much I already knew. Thank you, Mom and Ocean! After the pretest, I began the new material that I had to learn. Some of the things that I went over today as review and new material are: plotting latitude and longitude when given a location, plotting location when given latitude and longitude, speed/distance/time conversions, plotting a course to steer, speed made good, TVMDC conversions and many other useful tools. I spent my whole day going through each of these skills, making sure I had mastered them even if I had already learned them prior. Finally, I took some module quizzes so I could see how well I was actually doin

Blog Day 7      Good morning, day I don’t know! This morning I woke up early, picked up Dunkin, and headed to campus to have breakfast with my favorite freshman. Although this was not included in my hours, I thought it would be cute to include. I helped Evie study for her math test a little bit before she headed off to classes. After that, I hunkered down at my desk in the dorm and got to work. Today was a really big day because it was my last day before I started plotting navigation. I finished up the modules on the Code of Federal Regulations, Electronic Navigation, Safety, and Survival and passed all their tests easily. Doing those took most of the morning and some time into the afternoon. After a short lunch break consisting of hearing Kally play piano in the chapel, I took my final tests on Rules of the Road, praying that I passed. I did! These were no ordinary tests because, similar to my final cumulative exam at the end of the course, I needed a 90% to pass the section. I got a