I am still alive.
It's 7:30 in the morning on Thursday the seventeenth... I have a final at 8:30 and another at 7:15 tonight. It's good times.
This will be my first final, technically. Yesterday I had, instead of a final, a poster presentation for linguistics. It went pretty well, actually; naturally I put it off terribly but because the actual typing of information wasn't too difficult it went by very quickly. The trouble of course was in getting the information from my computer to the poster... but I had someone else to help with that, cheerfully cutting out things I'd already printed while I worked on later stuff. I am very grateful. (The poster still looks terrible, of course, compared to how other people made theirs all pretty and stuff, but I'd already shared that particular concern--not being able to make it look pretty--with the professor, and she assured me that she cared far more about the actual information presented.)
In any case, that's done now... also done is a lab report for BCS. Well, technically that was done a while ago, but if I'm talking about one of my major end-of-semester assignments, why not talk about the other?
The biggest problem I had with the lab report was figuring out how to run the experiment on people first. I had to run it on a minimum of six people and I ran around panicking that I don't know six people well enough to ask them to sit an experiment for me... and then fate was all "Have some peeps, yo" and I ended up with eight. True story! In any case, once I got to the actual writing part, I spent a lot of time reading one of the two optional readings that we could use as a source if we wanted (because who reads those ahead of time?) and ended up stuck deciding how ambitious I wanted to be with it. I could be all basic and get something done, I knew, or I could try really hard and end up with something I could really be proud of... if I managed to finish it in time. (A real concern when you're writing at two in the afternoon and it's due at five.) Ultimately I decided to do something somewhere in the middle (what? Moderation?), edging towards conservative, because I figured it would be better to actually get something done than only be able to turn in 80% of a really awesome lab report. So I turned in a complete lab report (a full 45 minutes before deadline, even!) that was only pretty good. I proceeded to get a perfect score. Okay, then. Ambitions, you have no place here!
Wait, that was the lesson I was supposed to take from that, right?
In other news, I go home on Saturday. Saturday is, uh, two days from now. What. I'm not really ready. Beyond everything else... I REALLY need to clean my room. It is very much a mess. It never recovered, see, from me being sick. There are water bottles and random clothes everywhere!
...Yeah, I'll have to spend some time on that today and tomorrow like whoa.
You know what would be pretty cool? Eating before my final. Too bad I don't have time for anything real. Maybe I can grab a bagel as I go. Speaking of, I should probably get ready to do that. I need to get dressed... for the weather, even, 'cause didn't you know Rochester actually looks like Rochester again! There's snow on the ground! Real snow! And it snowed all of yesterday! It's pretty awesome. Hello, snow. I'm going to be leaving you soon.
...Well now I've just made myself depressed.
This will be my first final, technically. Yesterday I had, instead of a final, a poster presentation for linguistics. It went pretty well, actually; naturally I put it off terribly but because the actual typing of information wasn't too difficult it went by very quickly. The trouble of course was in getting the information from my computer to the poster... but I had someone else to help with that, cheerfully cutting out things I'd already printed while I worked on later stuff. I am very grateful. (The poster still looks terrible, of course, compared to how other people made theirs all pretty and stuff, but I'd already shared that particular concern--not being able to make it look pretty--with the professor, and she assured me that she cared far more about the actual information presented.)
In any case, that's done now... also done is a lab report for BCS. Well, technically that was done a while ago, but if I'm talking about one of my major end-of-semester assignments, why not talk about the other?
The biggest problem I had with the lab report was figuring out how to run the experiment on people first. I had to run it on a minimum of six people and I ran around panicking that I don't know six people well enough to ask them to sit an experiment for me... and then fate was all "Have some peeps, yo" and I ended up with eight. True story! In any case, once I got to the actual writing part, I spent a lot of time reading one of the two optional readings that we could use as a source if we wanted (because who reads those ahead of time?) and ended up stuck deciding how ambitious I wanted to be with it. I could be all basic and get something done, I knew, or I could try really hard and end up with something I could really be proud of... if I managed to finish it in time. (A real concern when you're writing at two in the afternoon and it's due at five.) Ultimately I decided to do something somewhere in the middle (what? Moderation?), edging towards conservative, because I figured it would be better to actually get something done than only be able to turn in 80% of a really awesome lab report. So I turned in a complete lab report (a full 45 minutes before deadline, even!) that was only pretty good. I proceeded to get a perfect score. Okay, then. Ambitions, you have no place here!
Wait, that was the lesson I was supposed to take from that, right?
In other news, I go home on Saturday. Saturday is, uh, two days from now. What. I'm not really ready. Beyond everything else... I REALLY need to clean my room. It is very much a mess. It never recovered, see, from me being sick. There are water bottles and random clothes everywhere!
...Yeah, I'll have to spend some time on that today and tomorrow like whoa.
You know what would be pretty cool? Eating before my final. Too bad I don't have time for anything real. Maybe I can grab a bagel as I go. Speaking of, I should probably get ready to do that. I need to get dressed... for the weather, even, 'cause didn't you know Rochester actually looks like Rochester again! There's snow on the ground! Real snow! And it snowed all of yesterday! It's pretty awesome. Hello, snow. I'm going to be leaving you soon.
...Well now I've just made myself depressed.