Social Time

For those (two) of you who check and read the blog faithfully, hoping to find a new tidbit of information and lately finding none, I apologize. In the past two weeks I have had almost nothing to write about, except for the election. Here's what I've been up to that nobody wants to hear about:

- Being sick (last weekend through about Tuesday - went to the doc and got antibiotics, which always makes everything better).
- Matlab project.
- Planning and executing a Women's Panel for the SWE student section in which I'm an officer.
- Composing and mailing corporate fundraising letters for the same organization.
- Excessive amount of work for my "easy" online Drama course, including renting movies, reading entire (short) books for a weekly assignment, and the one assignment that turned out to be really fun: interviewing a high profile play director (and the dean of the school of theatre at UH). I now rest my assumptions that online classes will be more convenient.
- Design project for my Intro to Engineering class (okay, so we have almost nothing accomplished but our first team meeting is this evening).
- The bi-weekly Philosophy exam online, for which I didn't have time to read 25 pages but somehow managed to strategize a 90% on the test.
- Studying for my Matlab exam, worth 23% of my final semester grade.

I'll elaborate on the last one. I'm a part of an informal study group of people who are all in the same class, between 3 and 5 people at any given time. The exams are on Saturday mornings at 9:00 a.m. and each of us walked in there yesterday with many long hours of preparation and feeling like we owned the place. I had fully completed the exams from the last two semesters that we were given for practice, and looked through one from 1999, and my groupmates had done the same. Each was similar in material, and we all knew it inside and out. I honestly felt like with a little luck, I could earn 100% on that exam.

The transformation in our attitudes when we walked out was almost comical. The entire exam, up to (but not including) the last page, was almost exactly as I expected. I'm confident that I did well on that part. With 10 minutes left, I flipped to the last question. The description of the problem alone consumed almost the entire page, and it was full of equations and symbols we'd never seen - I wouldn't even say greek symbols, it was more like arabic. The entire correct solution, in the form of Matlab programming code, must have been forty lines long. Just to read the problem took about 4 minutes, another several to understand it, and I just started writing after that in order to have something down on paper. This problem would, in reality, require up to 30 minutes to complete, and it was worth 18 points. Fully three quarters of the people who began the exam did not finish in the time alotted. Those who did may just as well have been from the other class who was taking their test in the same lecture hall where we were. My entire group, all of us in the group who didn't finish (but keeping in mind that we're all easily in the top half of the class) walked out of the exam room feeling utterly defeated.

In order to ease our post-exam depression, we trekked over to the University Games Room to play some pool. One of the guys was easily running the table, but none of us were playing phenominally. After he left, I won the last game with a banked shot on the 8 into the opposite corner and 5 of the opponent's balls left on the table. Pool makes me feel great when I'm winning. The couple of Miller Lites and full-fat pizza we had later didn't hurt, either.

What's significant about this pool excursion is that it was the first time in about two weeks that I can remember having time to go out and be social - to actually see people in a non-work, non-study setting. It was almost like for a couple of hours I had my own life back.