The Long Road

04/11/2003 Archived Entry: "Kids, don't try this at home."

Well, that was certainly one of the most stressful days of my life! I had 2 final exams in one day. CS342 in the morning and STAT231 in the afternoon. They were the two hardest courses I had this term. About 2 days before the exams, there was still quite a large possibility of failing STAT231 so I was pretty freaked out. Studying time wasn't the greatest either since I had a CS360 final two days before. Time was much much tighter than usual. Luckily, the day before, while studying I had this HUGE realization: STAT231 is all about manipulating the standard deviation of the normal distribution! To manipulate SD you only need to know two rules SD(A+B)=root( sq(SD(A)) + sq(SD(B)) ) and aSD(a + bA)=bSD(A). They throw hundreds of models and tons of theory at us but in the end it was all about that damn standard deviation. You manipulate the SD to fit the model you have and plug it into the 5-6 equation that we had to memorize. Honestly, if the prof had ever summarized the course this way I would have had no probems at all figuring things out. As it was, I've had to stumble around all this material not really knowing what I was doing. Once that light bulb clicked though I saw everything in a new light (pardon the pun).

Want to know the craziest thing about yesterday's two exams? I slept about 10 minutes the night before. YA. It was certainly not something I was doing on purpose, I was done studying and in bed pretty early but could just not sleep. This happens to me pretty frequently, if I'm feeling too stressed or excited the amount of sleep I get usually suffers. At one point during CS342 I thought I couldn't do any of the programming questions because I couldn't wrap my head around the questions properly, I took a bathroom break and when I came back it was all pretty clear. Anyways, I feel like I did pretty well on my 2 exams BUT maybe I was completely dilusional and didn't know at all what I was doing? Hope not!