Wednesday, November 01, 2006

Congratulations! You're an idiot!

Just finished the second half of the EE 404 - Reliability - midterm. Wow. I thought that studying yesterday would help me be prepared for the onslaught of knowledge testing, but that was a bust. For the one question that I figured out a last minute answer which I was quite confident of, I may have done wrong because most people don't have answers which match me. That could mean anything, but I've come to note that it usually means that I was wrong. Then the second question I thought was pretty straight-forward, until I realized after walking out of the exam, that the graph was not a sucess density plot, but rather a failure density plot. All my answers were wrong, only because I didn't do the final step of reversing the answer.

I am failing this course. Is this because I don't know what's going on? Is it because I don't do the work? That would be a no on both accounts. I'm not completely clueless about the material, but I don't refresh myself on a daily basis as to what it is. I find that I get frustrated easily, and when I'm frustrated, I don't concentrate, because I'm screaming inside. Most of the language used I prefer not to hear or read, yet I always seem to tolerate my indiscrepencies. Most people would say just stop and take a breath. I stop, forget what I was doing, start from the beginning, get lost again, get frustated again, shut down, and the cycle continues until either a) I find the correct answer, b) I find a solution that quiets my demon, or c) I run out of time and it doesn't matter what kind of solution I have.

Some people will work on something until it's done. I can't do that. I only seem to work until I hit an impass (ie. I don't know what to do next). That's not entirely true. Sometimes I'll work through an impass, especially if it's some kind of writting assignment. Lab report, Gateway article, or even the reading journal. Even doing blog, I write until I can think of nothing else to write, or I revamp until I find something that sounds more of what I was going for.

After the midterm, I was poring over the notes, trying desperately to figure out where I went wrong, and why other people got the answers they did. For the life of me, I couldn't do it. Every calculation that I did resulted in the same result that I wrote down on the test. I don't even know if I got the project right or not. All will be revealed in due time. We'll get the test back, and I'll see how much trouble I'm in. WHY? Because of the instant society we live in perhaps. Should I blame society on my idiocy? That would be unfair. It's my fault I didn't review. I could have stayed at home and studied on Sunday. I could have spent more time last night reviewing procedures and notes. I should have done that. It's just when things seem so easy, that when I don't do them. Or is it? Getting an engineering degree isn't so simple. I've been at this for over five years now. It's not just something that I picked up and boom there it is. I've worked at this for a long time, bit by bit.

Even so close to the goal, I'm still in a state.

I'll have to mention this to the doctor tomorrow when I go in for my monthly I'm-not-crazy-give-me-more-drugs visit.

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