Inert Detritus The Internet's dust bunnies

The Final Semesters

With 39 cred­its stand­ing between myself and a diplo­ma in May, I’ve got more than a few cours­es to take each semes­ter. Tak­ing 21 hours this fall is going to be some­thing I’ve nev­er done before, both with respect to man­ag­ing that many hours of lec­tures each week, and han­dling the large amount of home­work (regard­less of the actu­al dif­fi­cul­ty lev­el) that comes with tak­ing sev­en classes.

I tell myself, over and over, that I’ve done worse. “Remem­ber Oper­at­ing Sys­tems,” I say. “You took 18 cred­its, worked part-time, and rushed a ser­vice fra­ter­ni­ty.” Oper­at­ing Sys­tems was, in a nut­shell, chal­leng­ing mate­r­i­al (learn­ing ker­nel inter­nals and basic oper­at­ing sys­tems con­cepts) that strove to defeat you by sheer vol­ume; it was a class that bet that you could­n’t pos­si­bly learn and under­stand the exist­ing code­base, ana­lyze the project, and put a work­ing solu­tion togeth­er in the time allot­ed. I’m quite grate­ful that I was with a group of peo­ple that I knew well: we trust­ed each oth­er to get the work done in time, and did­n’t waste any resources with “just in case they don’t do this right, here’s anoth­er approach” solu­tions that would have been unnecessary.

After tak­ing a course like OS, one termed the “cap­stone wash-out course” by the pro­fes­sor, I gained a new con­fi­dence in my abil­i­ty to han­dle a vol­ume of work beyond any­thing I’d ever antic­i­pat­ed facing.

Unfor­tu­nate­ly for the laid-back part of me, I’ve tak­en that con­fi­dence and run with it, opt­ing to take 21 hours, work part-time, and still make at least two rug­by prac­tices a week.

Here’s to giv­ing a whole new mean­ing to the word “busy”.