Friday, May 04, 2007

Switch on, switch off

The past few weeks have been a maelstrom of meeting with advisors, reading, studying, grading, writing, and more studying. In the meantime, it's gotten to be truly spring--sunny and warm during the days, cool at nights--perfect biking-at-night weather. I'm making the most of it while it lasts, and while I still live in a city where biking on the streets is not an invitation to get run over.

I've been trying to coordinate my exam studying and project-writing for this one seminar class, such that I study a fair amount and write two pages of the project each day. But I've been having trouble switching back and forth--yesterday I studied most of the day, then couldn't get the brain to switch gears enough to care about the project. So I studied some more. This morning? Woke up, thought I'd get the pages out of the way first thing, but all I can think about is the studying. So I'm going to go with the flow, for now, since at this moment the exam (next Thursday) looms large, while the bar for these projects has been set very, very low by the people who have turned theirs in to the class listserv already. But I'm frustrated at my own tendency to mentally estimate exactly how long things like writing and studying will take, and then not allow myself more than that to work. I was just unable to kick the studying into full gear until this past week, and I think I might have benefited from a longer, gentler lead-up to the exam. This feels uncomfortably like cramming.

But I did get assured by one of the committee members that "No one ever fails this exam." So whatever, except that I'd like to perform more than serviceably.

3 comments:

Jane Dark said...

Wow. But you only set your lists at the beginning of the semester, right? What do you have to do for this exam?

kermitthefrog said...

I think I need to answer that with another post... after I've done some work on the project today, that will be my break.

Bardiac said...

My advisor told me something about how he wouldn't let me take the exam if he didn't have confidence I'd do well. And in the end, it was okay.

I hope yours is way better than okay! I wish there were a realistic way to help you destress, but alas, I think there's not.