jeff shuck

Well, I had two exams yesterday, which is a tad absurd given that exams are usually associated with people half my age. When I was an undergraduate I was a very meticulous (perhaps even overly fastidious?) student. My entire life was perfectly formatted, neat and clean. While I’m probably still too particular for my own good, sixteen years of experience in the working world has taught me (somewhat against my will, I should say) to speed up, make quick decisions, and lower my quality expectations a bit. I mean, my own notes don’t need to be recopied for neatness, right? Right?

Probably a good thing for overall quality of life (don’t dwell on the small stuff and all of that), but definitely not a good thing for graduate school. I made a couple of dumb mistakes on both tests. Argh.

How do I know? Well, thanks to the wonders of modern instruction, the answers to the first exam were posted right outside the door to the room — presto, immediate self-flogging upon conclusion of the test. As to the other, well, you can’t get a bunch of graduate students together without the conversation turning to school in about four seconds. As soon as the second exam was done, small groups of students huddled together trying to buttress their confidence. Within a couple of minutes I realized I tackled one of the problems incorrectly.

The frustrating thing is that I understand the course material of both subjects conceptually, but I made either stupid math errors or jumped too far forward in making conclusions without thinking through the questions at hand. Argh. Annoying.

Oh well. It’s on to two more classes, and thanks to the pace of the program, I’ll get another shot at exams in six weeks.