The Night Before

Given my habit of waiting till the last minute to study for exams, deceiving myself into believing that I work better under pressure and that the reason that I procrastinate is so that I don't waste any time when it comes to the actual study, you would think that I'd have gotten over the panic attacks. Sadly, I haven't.

The odd thing was that this time, I felt more panicky last night than I do tonight, given that my exam begins in about eight hours. I'm not sure why, but I think it has something to do with being more afraid of Wednesday's Stochastic Modelling exam than tomorrow's Regression Modelling paper. Both of these subjects are of course terribly difficult, but Stochastic is clearly a league above Regression. Since I spent yesterday (Saturday) revising Stochastic, it might explain why I was more nervous last night than tonight.

I recall a similar post from year 12 which I can't be bothered checking now where I also published a blog hours before an impending exam. For some reason, putting off study to the last-minute gives me an odd rush, perhaps of adrenaline, perhaps just nerves. Whatever the case, it worked wonders last term during the mid-semesters, where the only revision I did for my Financial Mathematics exam was an eight-hour marathon the day before - and as a result, I score in the top quartile in my class (for the uninitiated, that means the top 25%).

Much as I realise that I can't allow this trend to continue, I find it hard to motivate myself during term when exams are weeks away and there are distractions right at hand, chief of them being the internal computer network. This year I moved on campus into Bruce Hall, and there exists a computer network between all the on-campus colleges such that using a certain program, rampant file-sharing occurs. I'd say about one to one and a half thousand students live on campus, and at its peak, there will be up to 500 users online at one time. At its peak, I've therefore seen up to 17TB of data shared on the network. The result is that there are thousands of movies and television shows available for me to download at the click of a button, and the phenomenal speed of download (up to 10 MB/s, average 300 kB/s) means that even the longest of movies can be downloaded within ten minutes, let alone episodes of my favourite TV shows.

This network has been the main detractant for me this last semester, so I plan to ebb the flow next semester and beyond. The latter may include moving off-campus so I don't have 24/7 access to the internal network as I do now. Of course the laptop is not alone in the blame. My sleep patterns are abysmal - I rarely sleep before 2am and often wake up after 11am. This means that during term, I find it hard to motivate myself to keep up to date, and marks are suffering as a result.

The primary difference between high school and university, I've found, is the degree of self-learning. In high school, you are tested on your subject every few weeks with tests, assignments and essays, all leading up to the final exam. In uni, you may have a subject where no tutorials are assessed, and the only assessments are an assignment and the final exam (as is the case with Stochastic Modelling). What's the motivation to keep up to date with such an assessment system? At times like this, I wish that we were made to do homework even in uni.

The result is this - the night before my exam, I haven't covered all the semester's material yet, and have had little practice at applying the theory. Next semester I will up the ante, but given my four exams are all within the next six days, I'm screwed for now. Better luck next time, eh?