Balance

Time has been flying past so quickly that I find it hard to believe that I've been in college for nearly a month already. It seems like yesterday that I first got here, and yet as I settle into a groove I feel like I've been in college for ages. Tuesday was the first time that anyone mistook me for a sophomore or junior. Apparently I have a certain level of confidence and look like I know what I'm doing.

That's not to say that life here is easy or that I do know everything. On the contrary, I feel like I'm one of the few people who knows nothing. In Intro to ECE my partner and I are the last group to finish our lab every week. It takes hours to do a mere half of the calculus assignments, and most of the time the answers are wrong on the first try. The only confidence I have is in my ability to catch on to concepts quickly if I spend enough time figuring them out. My partner and I spend extra time in the lab in order to catch up to the rest of our classmates who played with resistors and voltage sources as children. I often figure out calculus problems in two or three different ways to check answers and get extra practice.

The resident assistant on the floor said once that work here runs in two-week cycles: for two weeks you have a lot of free time, then for the next two weeks you have lots of homework, psets, and papers due. There has definitely been an increase in the amount of work this past week. Exams are coming up next week (most of my classes have three exams plus a final), so there will be a lot of studying this weekend. I have a calculus exam at 7:30 in the morning next Wednesday. On the same day the first draft of our first major paper in Interp and Arg is due. The next day there is an ECE exam.

Basically, this coming week will be spent in the study lounge, library, and a circle in the GSH Lounge solving circuits using nodal analysis and superposition.

What about this past week, you ask? There must be more to do at CMU than just studying, studying, and more studying, even right before exam week. My answer is yes, there is. I have been doing a variety of activities, including but not limited to juggling, ballroom dancing, running the volunteer table at the Technical Opportunities Conference, eating Malaysian food and carrot cake, marching through Hydroseed, and stopping in to say hi to Sruthi every time her door is open just because she likes the way I say her name with my American accent (and because I like saying hi). GSH has had activities as we normally do every week. We're trying to plan an alternative spring break to Nicaragua, and we had an information session (ie, more like a discussion or forum) about it this week.

As you can see, I am trying to make the most out of my education with a combination of school work and other activities. I have been keeping busy and am trying to budget my time as well as I can. This part of my college career is about finding a balance.