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TheOgre555
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Name: Dave
Birthday: 12/8/1987
Interests: My friends, 24, The Office
Expertise: Calculus and Physics
Occupation: Engineering
Industry: Research
Message: message me
Member Since:
10/20/2003
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| Final ExamsYea well, 2 down, 3 to go. I guess that's really the best way to look at it. The first one, Econ, wasn't that bad. I probably made some dumb mistakes and stuff like that, but it went well enough. Math was a different story. I didn't really get good solutions for two of the five problems. That makes me both sad and angry because I'm confident that I knew this stuff pretty well.
Anyway, rant over. Time to go back to studying because I have 3 more finals to take.
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| A solid 10 months or so since my last updateYesterday was my birthday. It was pretty fun. I hung out with people, had fun, and did as little work as possible.
The only problem is that now it's Sunday of finals week and I'm staring straight down the barrel of the loaded gun that is 5 final exams. It could be rough, there's really no way of knowing. Couple this with the fact that I excessively worry about every grade-related thing, and it's probably clear how I'm feeling.
Here's the deal:
5 Finals
Economics, Differential Equations, Separations (Chemical Engineering class),
Organic Chem, and Physics (Waves and Quantum Mechanics).
They are 3 hours, 3.5 hours, 6 hours, 4 hours and 4 hours long (respectively).
The first 3 are due Wednesday, then oChem on Thursday and Physics on Friday.
And it's funny, really, because before I got to Caltech I claimed that I wouldn't hold myself to such high standards of performance, but I still do, and it's causing me a large amount of stress. I guess that's both the blessing and the curse of habits.
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See ya in another 10 months.
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| So instead of being at home for the last 10 weeks of summer, I might spend that time at Caltech doing research on the excitation mechanism of molecular hydrogen in barred spiral galaxies. It should be really interesting. Also, if my topic is approved, it'll pay $6000.
My only problem with this project is that it takes me away from home for another 10 weeks. This means I'll have a whopping 3 week long summer vacation. I don't like that one bit. I'd love to stay home with my family and recuperate in preparation for another school year.
We'll see what happens; there are still a lot of things I have to do before anything concrete happens. Just pray that God puts me where I need to be this summer. One way or the other, it'll work out.
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| B Go really brought up a good point about achieving balance between my proposed type 1 and type 2 behavior. Of course that should be my goal, and it's kind of silly that I didn't recognize that right away. With that realization, I think my entry from yesterday makes more sense.
That is all. Now I need to go finish the rough draft of a paper before dinner.
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| So today I realized something. I think I can classify the world into two types of people.
1) People who see life as a series of "today"s. These are the people who live "in the moment."
2) People who see life as one today with an almost infinite amount of "tomorrow"s. These are the hopeful and the deliberate, people who aren't afraid to sacrifice excitement today in order to plan for a better series of tomorrows.
So in college, there are a lot of type 1 people. I kinda feel like I was one during first term. However, I've realized that living my life as merely a series of todays can be very unfulfilling. Often times, I'll finish a week and not really remember how I spent most of the 168 hours from Sunday to Saturday. Am I the only one that thinks this is a sad phenomena? Perhaps. I mean, I know that during that week, I enjoyed most of what I did while I was doing it. However, it's very difficult to derive meaning from just cruising through life.
I guess that's why I'm trying to become a type 2 person. It's not that I don't care about today or about having fun. It's not that I want to avoid the moment. It's that I don't want to let day-to-day living interfere with my priorities. I don't want to lose the meaning that I have already found in life.
My type 1 behavior has led me into a series of irresponsible decisions, and looking back, I would have liked to avoid almost all of them. Fortunately enough, no serious consequences have arisen.
And maybe all of this is wrong, but from where I'm sitting, it seems like a pretty accurate assessment of most of the people that I know.
This realization may just have been God's way of telling me to slow down, and re-evaluate what I'm doing with my life. Either way, I think it will help me change the way I act.
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