graduate from college

Damn, this last quarter kicked my ass. Two classes were notably hard. The first was Statistics 504: Applied Linear Regression. I have never had to work so hard, and yet learn so much in any class ever before. By the end of the course I found that I would get better homework scores if I re-did them after talking to a class mate and for the homeworks before that I redid them anyways begging for makeup credit from our teacher, so I basically did each homework twice. Also after I put all of the code and graphs in these STAT homeworks, the assignments typically were over 7 pages long typed!

The second was Urban Planning 501: Comprehensive Planning and boy did the class live up to it’s title. We comprehensively read FOUR (4) entire textbooks about urban planning all the way from this one writer (Hopkins) who spewed philosophy about urban planning to another writer (Babcock) who poked fun at the silly planners from a lawyer’s perspective.

I had two other classes as well, but they were nowhere close to the amount of workload of the other two. I did however get our group to make a sweet transit website called one bus away and I also wrote about the link between happiness and the built environment in my other Urban Planning class.

Yet I still managed to pass everything, where I was once worried that I would fail my statistics class. This next quarter is going to be tons of fun. I’m taking a class on transit planning, intelligent transportation systems, the fundamentals of transportation engineering and another class on urban simulation! I’ve already got an idea for my ITS class and that is to work in TSP on the Olive/Stewart corridor during peak hours. I can’t wait!

I am d-o- to the -n-e with this quarter. I feel pretty good about my finals and projects, but coulda done better. Ah well, I made it.

This time around, I was really organized and put everything into my planner which I check all the time. Instead of remembering “oh crap I have a midterm in 30 minutes” I only forgot one assignment which I had forgot to enter into my planner. I think it also helped that I talked a bit more with my classmates about the homework and stuff, because that helped me clarify stuff that I didn’t understand.

Next quarter I hope to build on this momentum of doing a bunch of schoolwork so I can stay ahead of the course schedule. I have set a big goal of being able to be more proactive rather than reactive in my education and career, and bit by bit I’m hoping to achieve this goal.

I’ve had two tests this week, a group 10 page paper due earlier this week, but I’m not done yet. I’ve got my own 10 page paper to write, part of another paper and another assignment all due on Monday.

It seems like there is much more work in Graduate School than I had in business school. This weekend will be a trial for myself to see what I can actually get done. And the work doesn’t stop here. I’ve got to write a paper within a paper for my research assistantship, and I have all the term projects/presentation/finals on the horizon as well. I’m already looking forward to winter break.