Limbo
The time is 8:41 PM on Sunday, April 25, 2021.
I almost forgot to write one of these again. I’m seriously giving thought to whether I should start setting alarms so I don’t forget to write. I was pretty methodical about writing these on Sundays, even without a set time, but I’m getting sloppy.
I existed during the past week between a state of “I can finally relax, school’s basically over,” and “I really need to stop slacking and study for that oral exam next Tuesday.” No state prevailed, and I oscillated between them throughout the entire week. Looking back to previous exam seasons, especially in undergrad, I honestly can’t believe how I coped with the stress and anxiety of having five or six final exams. I definitely think that there’s an undocumented but colloquially known exponential drop off in the ability to stay focused after graduating from undergrad, my tasks back then seem Herculean today.
I’d like to say that I’ve just gotten better at preparing for exams (so I stress less), but I wasn’t able to write that sentence without laughing so I’ll come clean: I probably just don’t really care anymore. I don’t mean this in a nonchalant way, I just mean that in the grand scheme of things, what I get on an exam or a final likely won’t matter. That is, of course, unless I absolutely fail an exam.
Once the exam for 539 is over on Tuesday and my partner and I hand in our final copy of our project for 508, I will have fulfilled the course requirements for my Masters degree. This feels really weird, I don’t feel any smarter, but I guess that’s the entire point of graduate school; making sure you really know that you really know nothing. That said, I’m looking forward to finally being done, I hope I pass all my courses.
I have absolutely no idea what I’ll do for the month of May. Part of me hopes that I can get started on some literature review for my thesis (undoubtedly the most difficult/not well defined problem in my degree), but realistically, I’ll probably end up doing nothing. In June, I’ll be starting work as a developer with the Data Management Organization at Twitter for a 3 month internship. I’m not really sure what the job entails besides the fact that I’ll be writing a lot of Scala, so more on that later (or when I actually start).
Until next week!