Daylight Savings!! Give me back my hour of sleep.

Hi guys, I'm going to keep this post short because I've got a bug that's been going around and I have to read two sections of lecture notes before my physics lecture tomorrow morning.




This past week was probably my most stressful since coming here. Two tests where I had no idea about how I was going to do: 8.022 (E&M) and 3.091 (Intro to Solid State Chem). I have to thank my friends who brought me cake at 3 am while I was studying last Tuesday and again on Wednesday night. It was definitely the best part of my week.

I went to 8.022 recitation the day before the test and realized I had no idea how to start solving problems involving conductors, so I reread the book and tried as many past problems as I could later that night. The following morning (ugh, 9 am test), this happened:

I don't know if it was because of the early test, the difficulty of the problems, or the short amount of time we had to finish it, but this is the best bell-shaped distribution of grades since coming here. Usually it's centered around 70-80 and we only see the left side of the bell. I'm just happy that I didn't fail, and that I even managed to get above average. It was a really hard test, but I feel like without the pressure of a time limit, I would have done so much better. Originally, this test wasn't supposed to be curved, but since the scores were so low, our instructor isn't going to give out letter grades for this test until the end of the semester.

Fortunately, my 3.091 test was on the opposite side of the scale. I was initially freaked out when the TA's handed out three thick packets to finish in an hour, but it was just three pages of problems with a whole bunch of scratch paper. We haven't got our scores back yet, but I walked out feeling the best I've felt about any test since coming here. In studying for this test, I realized how different teachers can dramatically change the class even with the same material. Last semester, the class was very computationally heavy, with most of the quiz and test questions involving a significant amount of math. Our teacher this semester really cares that what we take from this class is all of the concepts behind the math, so the majority of our test was written. I tend to agree with his idea, but I think it's also important to practice the calculations, and get a sort of "number sense" tying into these concepts.

Perhaps I'll tell you next week about the most recent addition to the things that tie my hall at East Campus together: Smash, Tetris, music, cats, not caring about East Campus leadership, and a 30 inch dildo.

Happy (?) Daylight Savings!

PS: I might get a research position at the Sadoway Lab for grid-level energy storage (giant batteries) over the summer!