The Lows

1 a.m. Thursday. Friday is an Institute holiday. I stopped working an hour ago, tried to arrange a last minute trip to the bar to wind down, failed, and decided I’d write a bit. My apartment has no means of entertainment and on the rare equations when I require it, this computer is my only refuge. My subconscious is firing some noise about a covariance matrix and a posterior density function that my computer has been telling me is not a number. Hopefully it will stop soon, or I’ll lie in bed thinking and fall into restless half sleep working on it all night. Frighteningly, I might make progress. To add to my current discomfort, I have two exams looming in my near future and I can literally feel my score dropping the longer this goddamn homework takes me. The first is Wednesday… I need to start studying by Sunday morning at the latest, and that’s going to be a tough deadline to meet. I’ll probably sleep very little between now and next Friday. I’ll stumble into my exams, bags under my eyes, caffeine shake, more prepared than I’ve ever had to be, and fight tooth and nail to beat the average. Meanwhile, I have to select the advisor that I will work for for the next 5 years of my life. And by select, I mean the exact opposite. Beg might be a better word. Try and convince someone that I’m a great fit for their group even though I’ve had no time to read their work or meet with their students. Convince them that they need to deny a handful of my classmates, who may or may not have a great deal more experience than me in their particular area. It’s going to be a rough haul till Thanksgiving.

On the bright side, FC Landau made the playoffs (our IM soccer team). We were undefeated in the regular season and last week we tied AP United in a glorious stand to seal the playoff spot. Rumor has it AP is a long standing playoff shoe-in at MIT. No more.

I feel like I’m at the point where it’s difficult for me to write about how I’m doing without introducing several characters. I’m not sure what the best way to do this is. Perhaps Dossiers.

Anyway, I’m tired now, so I’ll leave this uneventful and incoherent post as is and promise to fire somebody in Quality Control before the next.