Study Day Pt. 1-Day 122-May 12th, 2018

Despite an exhausting day of travel, I found myself only sleeping in until 8:30. I did spend about forty-five minutes on my phone, so some of the productivity of getting up early was lost.

I couldn’t shower last night, so that was my first task this morning. Once I was clean and dressed, I ate my breakfast. Since I was travelling most of the day yesterday, most of my meals were comprised of eating a bunch of snacks. I wasn’t that hungry last night, but I was now. One bowl of Frosties later, I was feeling good again.

It was time to hunker down and study. Today is Saturday and I have both my differential equations and physics exams on Monday. These next two days would have to be dedicated to studying. At BU, I usually give myself a week before exams to study for them, if not more time. While my classes here are still challenging, I don’t think I will have to study as much for them as I would at BU. Granted, I will probably devote at least six hours each for both exams.

After finishing breakfast, I hid my phone and immediately got to studying for math. My goal was to study for at least two hours in this sitting, if not more. The way I would do this would be by heavily reviewing the notes from our two review lectures. I made sure I understood every step of the problems and then rewrote them entirely. For this exam, we are allowed a “cheat sheet”. This is a piece of paper you can write anything on and bring to the exam. This is the oldest trick in the book for professors as it tricks students into studying more, since creating the page is really just studying. In my past experience, I barely even look at “cheat sheets” during the actual exam. I essentially rewrote all the review problems in very tiny font on my sheet.

Here is my “cheat sheet” and I look into my life of Diff Eq.

About three hours later, I was feeling pretty satisfied with this review session. My food supplies are running low, so I headed to the supermarket to pick up food for the next two days. This was one of the first times I actually remembered my reusable shopping bag.

Knowing I would go shopping again Monday, I really just got supplies to make one gigantic baguette sandwich that should be good for three meals. I also had some snacks and other food at home to supplement it with.

Feeling hungry when I got home, I assembled my mega sandwich and ate part of it for lunch. The absurd amount of bread, brie and ham made this very filling. After lunch, I gave myself another break from studying to watch an episode of White Collar on Netflix. I think having a reward system to incentivize studying helps me a lot.

After the episode, it was time to study for physics. Despite physics being one class at BU, it is two and technically three classes in France. One exam was a lab exam for quantum mechanics, and the other was a written exam that covered both special relativity and nuclear physics. I was focusing on the latter today. This relativity portion is frankly pretty stupid because it is considered a different class from nuclear physics by our French university. Our midterm was on it and we haven’t learned an new material on it since then. Yet, we were being tested on it again.

I spent about two hours working on exam from last year’s course. This class also let us have a “cheat sheet” for the exam. I am feeling good with the nuclear physics portion, but I have forgotten a lot of stuff from relativity. I need to spend some more time studying that.

Once I finished with that study session, I went to write my blog post for the day before. This took about two hours to write and I believe it is the longest post I have ever written at 2300 words. By the time I finished with that, I quickly whipped up some sausage, rice and beans. The other day I accidentally made some after forgetting I had host dinner that night. I just put it into a Tupperware in the fridge and saved it for later, which came in handy tonight.

After dinner and cleaning up, I went to work on my brother and I’s Mother’s day present. I am writing this post a day late, so nothing will be spoiled for Mom when she reads this. Over the past week, my brother and I have recorded a bunch of short videos that each gave a reason why we loved our Mom. I took all ten of the videos and edited it into a nice video with music for my Mom.

This editing took a while because my computer can’t run the editing program well and kept crashing. By the time I finished the video, it was past 1:00 AM and I went to bed.