Life, Writing, Weirdness

And relax.

The long version:

Late yesterday evening, I handed in the last item for the Fall term of my fourth year of honours Physics, a ten-page report on Star Formation Efficiency. The day before that, I wrote a very painful final exam for Electromagnetic Theory. Painful because I have no real interest in Electromagnetic Theory and can’t seem to get much of it to stick in my head at a time. The two things may be related.

But the term is over.

For the next three weeks, no more careening from one deadline to the next and desperately typing, calculating, or looking for references. Just breathe and exist.

Well, not quite. I do have a variety of things I want to get done today (and over the next three weeks), but the only thing I have to do is make a quick trip to the vet to get the elderpup weighed so we can see how much headway we’ve made with the thyroid meds and diet. She’s looking a lot better, and is much more doglike than the depressed, inactive pup we brought home six months ago, but there’s still some weight to lose and more anxiety to make progress on.

Which is not to say the winter break won’t be busy. Just not academically.

The list of things I want to do over the break includes things like getting the writing back on track, making headway on all the household chores I’ve let slide this term, Yule baking and cooking, spending a bunch of time with my family, and remembering how the saxophone works. Oh, and a little bit of thesis work – there’s a software problem I really want to have kicked before I get back in January. Just one, though.

But Lance, you need to keep an eye or two on the ball. You’re only off for a couple of weeks and then you’re back at the books.

Well, yes and no. I am going back to school the first week of January for my last term of undergrad, but the workload should be a lot lighter. I’ve covered off all of the science and math requirements for my degree and for the MSc bridge program and just have my thesis to worry about as far as required courses go.

The rest of my academics for the term are all the electives I haven’t taken for the past four terms, and I’ve picked things that I intend to be fun. No more classes I have to take just because they’re core courses for Physics even though they have nothing to do with the Physics I want to do going forward (I’m looking at you, Electromagnetic Theory). I’m not saying that everything is going to be easy or that there won’t be periods of heavy work, but the length of my work week has gone up for the last seven consecutive terms from the general manager expectation of 10 hours per week per course to be successful to something around 80 hours on average this past term. No longer sustainable, but I’ve hopefully arranged things so that I don’t even have to try.

Three of them are First-Year courses and one is Second-Year. That doesn’t necessarily mean they’ll be easy, but my recollection of courses I took in First Year is that they didn’t require the same level of intense study that things have this year.

Plus, technically, I only need three of the four electives I’ve registered in to have all the courses replaced from my original academic career with things where the grades were actually good. So I could, if I think it’s necessary, drop one. And I can designate another as a Personal Interest Credit, which makes it Pass/Fail and irrelevant to my GPA.

So things get better for my last term as an undergraduate. Several people have expressed to me that they’ll believe it when they see it, but this is how I planed things out before I got accepted into the accelerated MSc program. Getting that acceptance just made the last term harder.

And, once again, TLDR: Today I get to breathe and relax.

Be well, everyone.