notes from this past week
dear life,
thank you for completely falling apart on the day of my thesis defense. and once again on thursday. i did not need that.
just letting you know,
poornima
other notes to self:
- always be wary of a class where well over 50% of your grade depends on class participation and homework sets and the final exam. especially if you plan on hardly ever going to class. and/or turning in one homework set over the entire semester.
- if you suck at time management, factor procrastination into your timeplan at the beginning of the semester. that way you won't wonder why you seem to be rushing from one deadline to another towards the end of the semester. (i think i factored in 15 hours of procrastination per week. i realize i needed at least about 3x that.)
- running on 20 cups of coffee and a couple cans of monster energy drink/red bull a night does bad things to your nerves. it does not calm you down.
- along those lines, when your brain's twitching and you can't focus as well as you'd like to, call it a night. there really is no replacement for good sleep.
- i have wonderful, amazing friends who listen to me whine and vent when i'm having a bit of a meltdown and who make me laugh and just happy in general. must spend more time with them. there are also other people that make me twitch and think violent thoughts, and just do bad things to my sanity. must. pick. battles. wisely.
elaboration:
thesis defense went well. non-CS folks managed to understand at least a tiny bit of what i was saying (although evgenia the art major whines about the lack of color), and the CS profs seemed to like it. i hadn't slept since 8ish am on sunday morning, so i was pretty much dead at 4pm on tuesday and my brain and my body were running at totally different speeds. i wasn't sure if i wasn't even making sense, but dominique thought i had a good pace, and i answered questions fine. he thinks some slides could have been a little less cluttered (or at least i'd presented the information in stages), and in retrospect, i quite agree. goddamned animations took hours to create, but it was worth it in the end.
thought my life would be restored to some semblance of normalcy after that was over, but really no, that didn't happen because i suddenly realized just how much i'd slacked off because i was spending all my time in mcconnell working on the thesis. a quick damage assessment later, i realized that if i completely bombed the final for egr301, i'd be pretty much fucked because as much as that class is clearly not engineering, ABET still wants it to be one of the math/science requirement courses. dammit. this means i'll need to re-learn everything that was covered over the semester. which is okay because i'm not completely stupid and it's mostly math. but i'm still mad at myself for letting it slip to that much of an extent that completing my engineering major would be in jeopardy. especially because i hate the very thought of failure. ah well, i shall get by with a crappy grade and hopefully have the good sense to not dwell on it for too long.
engineering design stuff went well. we need to re-edit our final report, and complete the user manual and whatnot. but it's mostly done. and i have been feeling a lot more optimistic about life in general and that is a good thing because i like myself better this way. need to work on robotics because i've let that slide more than any other class (not that i didn't put in the time, it's just that it's as demanding as any 600 level course should be), but that shall happen.
i'm going crazy and the last couple of weeks even made me reconsider how much of a break i needed to academia and sleep-deprivation (two years of being lazy doesn't sound like a bad idea at this point), but hopefully that shall change soon because i really don't know what i would do with myself when i have that much free time on my hands. we're shelving post-graduation plans until commencement. good thing sweden doesn't want confirmation of attendance until well into the summer.
margaret cho yesterday = awesome. they really need to have her + tristan taormino on the same stage. that would make me all kinds of happy. green day in a bit, and i didn't even like their new album so i don't know why i'm going. ah well, more time with friends and away from academia. and they'd better play stuff from kerplunk and dookie.
thank you for completely falling apart on the day of my thesis defense. and once again on thursday. i did not need that.
just letting you know,
poornima
other notes to self:
- always be wary of a class where well over 50% of your grade depends on class participation and homework sets and the final exam. especially if you plan on hardly ever going to class. and/or turning in one homework set over the entire semester.
- if you suck at time management, factor procrastination into your timeplan at the beginning of the semester. that way you won't wonder why you seem to be rushing from one deadline to another towards the end of the semester. (i think i factored in 15 hours of procrastination per week. i realize i needed at least about 3x that.)
- running on 20 cups of coffee and a couple cans of monster energy drink/red bull a night does bad things to your nerves. it does not calm you down.
- along those lines, when your brain's twitching and you can't focus as well as you'd like to, call it a night. there really is no replacement for good sleep.
- i have wonderful, amazing friends who listen to me whine and vent when i'm having a bit of a meltdown and who make me laugh and just happy in general. must spend more time with them. there are also other people that make me twitch and think violent thoughts, and just do bad things to my sanity. must. pick. battles. wisely.
elaboration:
thesis defense went well. non-CS folks managed to understand at least a tiny bit of what i was saying (although evgenia the art major whines about the lack of color), and the CS profs seemed to like it. i hadn't slept since 8ish am on sunday morning, so i was pretty much dead at 4pm on tuesday and my brain and my body were running at totally different speeds. i wasn't sure if i wasn't even making sense, but dominique thought i had a good pace, and i answered questions fine. he thinks some slides could have been a little less cluttered (or at least i'd presented the information in stages), and in retrospect, i quite agree. goddamned animations took hours to create, but it was worth it in the end.
thought my life would be restored to some semblance of normalcy after that was over, but really no, that didn't happen because i suddenly realized just how much i'd slacked off because i was spending all my time in mcconnell working on the thesis. a quick damage assessment later, i realized that if i completely bombed the final for egr301, i'd be pretty much fucked because as much as that class is clearly not engineering, ABET still wants it to be one of the math/science requirement courses. dammit. this means i'll need to re-learn everything that was covered over the semester. which is okay because i'm not completely stupid and it's mostly math. but i'm still mad at myself for letting it slip to that much of an extent that completing my engineering major would be in jeopardy. especially because i hate the very thought of failure. ah well, i shall get by with a crappy grade and hopefully have the good sense to not dwell on it for too long.
engineering design stuff went well. we need to re-edit our final report, and complete the user manual and whatnot. but it's mostly done. and i have been feeling a lot more optimistic about life in general and that is a good thing because i like myself better this way. need to work on robotics because i've let that slide more than any other class (not that i didn't put in the time, it's just that it's as demanding as any 600 level course should be), but that shall happen.
i'm going crazy and the last couple of weeks even made me reconsider how much of a break i needed to academia and sleep-deprivation (two years of being lazy doesn't sound like a bad idea at this point), but hopefully that shall change soon because i really don't know what i would do with myself when i have that much free time on my hands. we're shelving post-graduation plans until commencement. good thing sweden doesn't want confirmation of attendance until well into the summer.
margaret cho yesterday = awesome. they really need to have her + tristan taormino on the same stage. that would make me all kinds of happy. green day in a bit, and i didn't even like their new album so i don't know why i'm going. ah well, more time with friends and away from academia. and they'd better play stuff from kerplunk and dookie.