The Trials

The first semester’s finals week is a hellish right of passage for CSE (college of science and engineering) students. The sheer quantity of material—regarding chemistry , calculus, physics, and yada yada—that we must attempt to shove into our measly little brains... ha. I truly feel as if I am twisting and stretching my brain capacity.

I’ve barely eaten. I’m not hungry. I’ve barely slept, though I’m dead on my feet, and I’m FAR from the only one. You could bury someone in the depths of my friend’s eye bags. 

If I don’t do well on these cumulative finals, I might not pass my classes. I would waste this semester’s tuition of $12,000, and too low of a GPA will disqualify me from the RA (Residential advisor) position in which I can save approximately $10,000 on room and board. In other words, $22,000 is riding on my ability to recover countless obscure concepts I learned up to three months ago. Yay. (Edit: this paragraph is slightly hysterical and not entirely accurate considering that I would really and truly have to FLUNK and completely drop the ball on a final in order to actually fail a class, because my grades were high enough in the first place.)

From the top of my head my right now, here is everything I need to know for my Calc 2 final:

- Separable, linear, second-order, homogeneous and non-homogeneous differential equations

- Slope fields

- Series tests: divergence test, geometric series, ratio test, integral test, direct comparison test, limit comparison test, alternating series test

- Taylor Polynomials and the series formulas for ln(x+1), e^x, x^k, sin(x), cos(x)

- Power Series

- Lagrange error bound (good fudging fudge)

- Cross product, dot product, and magnitudes of vectors

- Work integral formula, specifically for pulling a leaky bucket out of a well

- Euler’s method (THE WORST most TEDIOUS method IN THE UNIVERSE for estimating the area under a curve)

- Formulas of the volumes of disks, washers, spheres, and shells from a 2D graph (This is fine. This is fun.)

- Newton’s Law of Heating and Cooling

- Exponential growth

- Carrying capacity and decay

- Calculating the concentration of salt in a bucket with salty water of one concentration entering and salty water of another concentration exiting

Alright, that was one class, ignoring all of the u-substitution, integration by parts, and partial fractions, and other calculus one knowledge we are already expected to have. Lol. Also, writing all of that down, I promise I looked no further than my own brain at this very moment to remember all those topics. I have spent over 10 hours studying for this class in the past few days, and it doesn’t feel like enough.

Now for the two other classes…

No, I don’t wanna.

When they say engineering is hard, I thought, sure, but I can do it. And I can, I think, but YEESH.

Even so, somehow, in addition to literally countless physics equations, I find I’ve also memorized a ridiculous number of arbitrary constants. Tell me why I have the atomic mass of oxygen (15.999 g/mol), speed of light (3.01 x 10^30), and universal gravitational constant (6.67 x 10^-11) at the top of my head. Plank's constant and Avogadro's number were in there too at some point.

However, all this frustration and stress comes with something positive too. The indescribable feeling of realizing I am smarter now than I was. I succeed now, where I failed before. I tried, I failed, I struggled, and I grew.

And I still get problems wrong. Frequently. Maybe I forget to include the angular component of kinetic energy or that the denominator “k” of the Taylor polynomial for the natural log of x doesn’t have a factorial, but sometimes… I get it right.

Feels nice.

Another bonus, for these next few days, I have one sole purpose. Study. For the moment, I’m not allowing myself to worry about the state of the world, my internship applications, or an impending mid-life crisis. I just study. (And write this blog, apparently).

I hope you all are staying warm... it's crazy out there.

Edit: I passed all my classes by a long shot :)