Ten-Minute Talks: Semester Reflection

On Tuesday around 4 pm, I walked out of the last final of the semester. While I’d been preparing mentally for the feeling, I couldn’t help but feel unsettled.

Before I explain why, I want to take a quick reflection of the semester.

This semester was different from past semesters. The immediate change was that I was no longer in charge of the Longhorn Catholic Council. No more weekly meetings, no more constant thinking about how to improve the organization, and no more constant streams of communication with my team. It was relieving at first, but I grew to miss the feeling of leading something bigger than myself.

That’s not to say I didn’t keep busy. My first senior design class (at UT we have two) kept me plenty busy. Our project was to build a semi-autonomous shopping cart. And in a class full of mechanical engineers, people with coding experience are in short supply. With a project this programming heavy, a very large proportion of the work fell on the guy with “some” coding experience: me. That project culminated in a full week and a 13 hour workday to get the cart done, but we were successful! It gave me immense satisfaction to see the cart working, especially as I saw it running through all the lines of code I’d programmed.

My research also picked up this semester. For those of you who haven’t heard me talk about it, I’m working on a model to aid in temporary housing assignment and allocation. The project was hatched by a professor here at UT, Dr. Kutanoglu, in the wake of Hurricane Harvey. A part of this semester has been developing the methods behind the model (using a mixed-integer stochastic program with some clever scenario generation techniques), but a larger part has been seeking a partner agency to work with. While the research will likely result in a paper, it would be even more rewarding to see it make the disaster response process more streamlined and effective.

As someone who’s lived through a few hurricanes myself, I’ve greatly appreciated the opportunity to participate on the project. Harvey left me with the ultimate feeling of helplessness, seeing from afar how my hometown was decimated in a single weekend. And while the following rally and relief effort was inspiring, I knew there had to be a way for my technical skills to be able to make a big difference. Seeing the potential of my project has solidified my choice to pursue it in graduate school. I’m grateful to be learning a discipline with so much humanitarian potential.

In addition to these projects, I took my first graduate level class in Applied Probability. As I wrote in a previous post, that course helped me shift my mindset about events and their occurrence. Unfortunately, as much as I’d hoped to ace the class, I underperformed on the final and ended up with an A-. Looking back on the afternoon after the final, when I already had a bad feeling about my score, I can’t help but appreciate the irony. The test is 40% of my grade, but it’s just a single three-hour test. Studying could increase my chances of doing well on the exam, but it wouldn’t guarantee it. So when my first reaction was to feel guilty for not studying harder, I had to stop myself. I was readily prepared for the exam, and I very well may have aced it on a different day. But when it comes down to it, tests are just another example of when we have to roll the dice and accept an outcome. I did my best to raise my odds, but I guess I just ended up in the “A-“ section of the sample space.

In fact, I didn’t really perform well on my other exam that day (Dynamic Systems and Controls). Now, the two were likely not independent. For one, I studied much more for Applied Probability than for DSC. When it came down to it, I had a higher grade in DSC going into the final, which was worth less than in Applied Probability. But AP also just threw me off. Walking out of the exam, I wasn’t confident in my score. Anxiety about my grade followed me for the next two hours, until it was time to take my DSC exam. And I know I shouldn’t have let it get to me, but I just didn’t push through mentally. While I underperformed on DSC, it wasn’t enough to drop my GPA in the class.

When I reflected on that a few days later, I couldn’t help but think about how slim the chances were that I’d perform worse in two exams. I genuinely can’t remember more than one time a final exam has brought my grade down; finals week offers such a focused environment for studying. And yet, here it had happened twice in one day.

While I still had a final (Calculus III), I found it difficult to focus on studying. Call it burnout, senioritis, or laziness if you want; I haven’t quite diagnosed it myself. I felt pretty confident going into the exam despite this waning motivation in large part because of my previous performance on the exams.

Now, I don’t know as of today (Thursday) what my score on the exam was, but I doubt it was as high as the midterms. The final was more difficult, with problems I hadn’t practiced explicitly (I conceptually understood how to solve them, but it was a bit more taxing and I may have messed up my notation).

So when I turned in my last final, you would expect me to be relieved to have finished.

A bigger, more internal, journey I’ve taken this semester has been with transition. With just a few months left in college, I no longer have the luxury of investing a year or two of my time into an organization or project. With the application process for graduate school, the end is even closer in sight.

That’s why finishing this semester was bittersweet. I’ve got one semester left! It’s something to celebrate, sure, but it also comes with the caveat of leaving a community I’ve grown into for the last three and a half years of my life. Honestly, I’m really happy here. It’s hard to give up where I am now in college to move onto wherever life is getting ready to take me. Of course, as I write this it sounds a lot like complacency. I know that change is a natural part of life, an I’m sure I’ll feel the itch for something new by the time I finish with college.

But for now, I’m going to be grateful for what I’ve gotten out of college. All the mistakes, the growth, the lessons and the relationships I’ve built since high school have made me at least twice the person I was before. Over the holidays, I’m hoping to take some time to sit back and reflect on where I am and how far I’ve come.

But I’m also going to try to build the model for my research, use some data analysis tricks to make a March Madness bracket (which I will almost surely post about soon), and take a Federal Government class online to satisfy the Texas Core requirement (so I don’t have to take it next semester). There ain’t no rest for the wicked!