11 Rahmat 168 B.E. (Baha’i Calendar)
Soundtrack in my head: Public Image Ltd., “Public Image”
I’ve actually now completed my Statistics class mid-term, and I think I did pretty well–maybe even quite well. As I was studying, my old school studying tricks came back to me, and there were only one or two questions on the exam (out of roughly 35) where I found myself thinking, “Ooh, I should have tried harder to memorize that part of the notes.”
It is rather interesting going to school in 2011 after not having done so since 1989. Email wasn’t used when I was an undergraduate–at least not those of us in the Liberal Arts and Sciences ghetto. Microsoft Word had been invented by that point, but when I was an undergraduate, it was still WordPerfect’s bastard stepchild. Microsoft Power Point had not been invented at all. WordStar was considered to be a legitimate word-processing program.
Now I have my own campus email address. (Unfortunately I couldn’t pick the name–they auto-assigned it to avoid duplication and to avoid email addresses like uberthorlazergeekgodandruleroftheuniverse@wisc.edu.) I can actually email my homework and download my syllabus. My instructor actually uses Power Point and we get Power Point printouts of the lectures, making it necessary only to add notes to the notes already there.
Before class started, I remember wondering what I should bring to class with me. A spiral notebook? A three ring binder? A Trapper Keeper? I agonized over whether I should bring my laptop to class and whether I could simultaneously take notes and check Facebook at the same time like any good Gen-Y’er. Turns out there was no need in this case–with all the handouts the three-ring binder ended up being what I needed.
But in a scenario that is very 2011, I was doing my homework in a coffee shop one afternoon when I realized that the built-in calculator on my Android phone didn’t have a square-root function. So I went onto Android Market, found a scientific calculator app, downloaded it to my phone and continued working on the statistic problem I’d started a few minutes before.
It’s tricky balancing school, work and life, and is definitely something I’m still getting used to…
