Post-Drop Day

So it's 3:20 AM here. I can't fall asleep, so you, my dear reader, are benefiting. Or not. Well guess what... you get to hear about my day! I woke up at around 2 PM today, made some food and some coffee with my new French press, and started working on studying for my Math 1D final. I took the final at 7 PM (it was a 3 hour test), and somewhere in between there I found a Windows XP SP2 disk and installed Windows on my macbook again. So... an entire day devoted more or less to my Math 1D final. But I learned some other things today... Caltech's unit system for how courses are weighted isn't completely random. It's supposed to mean how much time is spent on classes/homework/lab per week. So let's crack open the Caltech Course Catalog...

This term I'm taking:

        class-lab-homework

Math 1D:     2-0-3
Chem 1B:     4-0-5
Phys 1B:     4-0-5
ChE  10:     2-0-1
PE   70:     3 units
Math 1B:     4-0-5

So I'm supposed to have about 19 hours of classes and about 19 hours of homework per week, for a total of less than 40 hours of "work" per week. Sounds TOTALLY manageable, right? Not for me! My google calendar has 17 hours of class scheduled for me. Hah! Screwed you over, Caltech. Turns out ChE10 only meets once a week for an hour, it's a seminar 'pizza' course. Oh, and PE 70, my weightlifting class, only meets twice a week, not three times. OK, so 17 hours of class/week. (And last week, I went to every single class and recitation session. w00t.) What's the problem then? Well. Take Ma1D for instance... 3 hours of homework/week? Yeah right. Today, I didn't spend enough time studying for the final, I should have spent another entire day to get everything right on the exam. In fact, it wasn't an open book exam, but if I had studied another entire day, and been able to use my book and notes, I still wouldn't have gotten everything... proofs are really difficult for me. "But finals week is an anomaly," you say. Not every week is like finals week, requiring 10+ hours of work. Well, I routinely spent five or six or seven hours on a Ma1D set, and routinely scored less than seventy percent, even after consulting with my TA and collaborating with other students.

How about Ma1B, my linear algebra class? The sets I turn in are around 15 pages each, I have half an inch of graded assignments plus a midterm and an entire 2" D-ring full of lecture notes, handouts, and other stuff. I spend maybe five or six or seven or eight hours a week on this (I'll probably spend all of my productive hours tomorrow on set 7.).

OK, and chemistry? Five hours of class/week, which I usually go to. This week, I screwed Caltech over again, my set only took three or four hours. It was an easy set, organic chemistry stuff, IUPAC names, 3-D structures/isomers/enantiomers/other stuff. So, I only spent four hours instead of five! Oh wait, it's a quiz week. So I'll spend Monday preparing for the quiz that's due Tuesday, and probably get reamed anyways. Oh well, I have a C in there, and it's still pass/fail.

I feel like shouting to every high school in America, "Don't choose Caltech unless you LOVE MATH AND SCIENCE and you either don't care or just plain hate everything else!" But at the same time, I feel doubt about whether or not I want to transfer.

Why is that? It doesn't make sense. My sleep schedule/personal life is fucked, I don't participate in anything school related except classes, and I see no research or interesting academic opportunities in my near future. And I hate all of my classes (except chemistry, which is interesting right now).

I'm getting my ass kicked here, I might be able to succeed next term, but not to the point of having enough free time to do anything fun on a regular basis... I'm lucky the people here are really cool. On the other hand I can understand why some of these brilliant students are driven to alcoholism and substance abuse.

You might be happy to know I didn't spend all of Friday night studying and doing homework and whatnot. Blacker House played Lloyd house in Capture-the-flag, all campus style. Such keep-sane activities are awesome. Both houses grabbed arm bands of different colors and a flag, and set off to their respective sides. It was three hours of running around in the steam tunnels, random buildings, and campus gardens, running reconnaissance missions to plot locations of the enemy jail and flag, getting tagged and taken to jail, and intimidating the other team along the neutral zone. It was pretty sweet, even the ending, when Lloyd house served milk shakes and smoothies back in their dining hall.

In other news, I'm realizing I'm sort of popular. If you search technorati's blog listings for "ricketts caltech", three of my blog posts come out on top. If you're a pre-frosh considering Caltech, here's a little disclaimer: I'm not necessarily representative of Caltech, or Ricketts House. But FUCK Fleming. And Ruddock. And Lloyd. And Avery, but they're not a hovse anyways. I'm going to start spamming my listings with keywords like CALTECH ADMISSIONS and IMPROVE YOUR SAT SCORES so people read about my experience here at Caltech. It's not all bad. But it's mostly bad.

Man, do I love to bitch about school. I never used to be like this! What did I used to do with all of my time??? Let me know if you've seen my sanity. :\ It's 4:13. Time to try sleeping again.

/rskjr