graduate with a 4.0

For this semester, at least. I think I even have an A in the dreaded Russian 101 class. Man, that professor seems to hate me though.

I can’t help that I have a horrible accent.

Success!!! First 4 classes done with straight A’s!!!

...not really, i did the best i could. i missed a 4.0 for my BS degree by just one class… now ill miss a 4.0 for my Masters by at least one class as well.. Oh well, im planning on getting a PhD at this point & apparently GPA no longer matters once you hold a PhD… you don’t even put it on your resume.

...that fact makes me wonder if worrying about GPA was so important all along. probably not, but then again, if i wasn’t constantly trying to do the best i could in school, i wouldn’t be in a position to go for a PhD now….

so its all good =D

So Good. Got the first grade of my Graduate Studies. This is a great way to start.

i need to get better grades. 3.5 isn’t gonna get me a scholarship :/

Masters classes start in just over a month. Right now I am excited, but i’m sure the nerves will set in soon. There will be a slight lifestyle change, but I can/have to do this. First thing in awhile I have been excited and motivated for…

All my grades are in now and I did indeed get all A’s this semester! I was excited to see that my cumulative GPA (including my rather checkered past at community college) is now up to 3.547. But again, my goal is just to graduate having a 4.0 record at Sac State.

I’ll keep working towards this goal by doing well in my summer class and preparing for fall (by way of my other goal—‘read fall semester books over the summer’).

Oh—and I did get that massage from my fiancee as my reward and it was fabulous. He rocks. I hope I can be as supportive when he goes back to school!

I took my final exams for John Milton and American Women Writers on Thursday. They were one after the other, so it was nearly four straight hours of essay questions. My right hand was worked to the bone! But I felt like I did really well. I started to lose focus toward the end of the second test, when I was the last person sitting in that room (I like to use all the available time), but I had a high enough A in the class already that I didn’t need to worry about perfection on the final. And those were my last two finals, so I’m officially done with spring!

Thursday was also a happy day for me academically because I got two essays back, and it turned out both were A’s. On my Milton essay, my professor wrote that it was “so good” that I should enter it in a scholarship contest next spring. And on my essay for her class, my American Women Writers professor wrote that it was the best essay she’d read all semester. I did feel that I did a good job on both of those essays, but I wasn’t expecting a response that great. It’s just another reminder that I do have useful skills… I just need to figure out how I want to use them and then develop the motivation and self-discipline to actually do it. If I can do this well in school, surely there’s some career out there that will work for me.

Also, the morning of those last finals, I had a studying experience that really made me realize, if I didn’t already know, what’s so great about being a dedicated student. I was studying Milton’s Complete Poetry and Selected Prose, scanning over the works we’d read earlier in the semester and writing down key concepts and what Milton said about them… liberty, reason, good and evil, etc. As I was doing this, I realized that I had come to a point where I really got it! I really felt like I understood what Milton was about, like I could really see the big picture that all his ideas and writings formed.

It was a great feeling because it told me that I’d really engaged in the subject, rather than just forcing some vaguely connected facts into my brain and trying to retain them until the final exam was over. I’ve taken that approach before and gotten A’s out of it, but I’m not going to settle for that anymore. My 4.0 at Sac State is going to come not from faking it but from giving my best effort in each class—and taking from it everything it has to offer.

And it looks like I’ll get that 4.0 this semester, after all! Two of my four grades posted yesterday, and they were A’s. And that included my Shakespeare class, which is the only one I had any reason to be concerned about. I’m almost 100% positive that the other two will be A’s, but I’ll keep checking just to make sure.

Completed my British Literature II final exam this afternoon, and I feel like it went extremely well (even though I didn’t do the studying I’d intended to do). The final is worth 40% of my grade, and I’m pretty sure I already have a high A in the remaining 60%, so I feel quite confident that I can chalk this one up as another step toward my 4.0!

And after the final, the professor (Dr. Toise—one of Sac State’s great English professors, by the way) thanked me for being in the class and told me he could tell I was a serious student and he appreciated that. That made me feel quite happy!

Despite my obsessive checking, the grade for my Shakespeare class still hasn’t been posted. I guess it did only end six days ago.

If I finish this semester with a 4.0, my fiancee has offered to give me a massage. And as he is a certified massage therapist, this is definitely a desirable prize!

I just finished my last week of classes—only final exams remain. I feel very confident about all three of them, but I’m going to do some studying anyway.