I’ve been going to graduate school for the last three years, but I’ve been skipping the Falls semesters since I started. It always seemed that the Fall and Winter seasons are always busy and so I’ve avoided taking classes around this time of the year. This year was different. Every time you skip a semester you’re considered a drop-out and so you have to reapply to graduate school. The application fee is $50 and it was starting to get expensive. But that isn’t the part that bothered me most. It was that I had to fill out those stupid forms in the middle of the busiest time of the year. Between Thanksgiving, Christmas and New Years.
So, this year I was determined not to skip Fall semester. Knowing that it might get hectic, I decided to take the engineer’s equivalent of Basket Weaving 101, but for graduates. Something easy to fulfill the requisite hours. So I took up a class with which I’m quite familiar. It’s one of my primary functions at work. How difficult can it be? At some point in the future, my demise will probably begin with the phrase, “How difficult can it be?” I’ll tell you how difficult. Very! But not in the technical sense. I have a grasp on the subject. The problem is attributed to time. Or the lack of it.
My first mistake was the assumption that all the course would require is some menial repetitive homework and a little project which demonstrates our basic cognizance of the subject. It is the exact opposite. My second problem is that just because an apple and a mango are fruits does not mean that they can be eaten the same way. Sure what I did at work is very similar, but I had to digest [to further muddle my food analogy] new information in regards to the tools we were using. At work we had different sets of tools than the ones in class. So I had to learn a new set of tools before ever even delving into the mechanics of the project.
My second miscalculation came with the fact that I had underestimated how much work was going to pile up at the day job. I usually stay a little later to catch up. So by the time I get home, I’m tired already. The last thing I want is to stare at a computer screen, read technical documentation, do school assignments for another 4 hours. So I put it off until 11 or 12 midnight so I can relax a little before I start working on class assignments. Then I stay up late until 2 or 3 in the morning before I drag myself to bed exhausted. On top of that, I have to leave work at 3:15 in the afternoon to get to class every Monday and Wednesday. This breaks my weekly rhythm and so I’m not as effective at either work or class as I would like to be. I’m going to have to rethink how to handle this for the spring semester.