Nothing like grad school to make you feel stupid
The title says it all. Lately I've been feeling unintelligent and mentally useless and confused and, well, stupid. I have a couple homework assignments due this Friday, and they have been kicking me in the butt. I've never before spent six hours looking at a problem and finding myself no further along than when I started.
For my continuum mechanics class, we have homework due every Friday. The weekend after we turned in the first assignment, our professor emailed the class saying over half of us had failed. Yikes! We all seemed to be making a common error and he gave us a second chance to turn in the homework the following week. He still hasn't returned the original assignment, so I have no idea how I did. I chose not to redo it because I thought I did it right, thought I don't really know. But now that I don't have any feedback on my previous work, I don't know if I've been continuing to do the assignments wrong after that.
My second class, theory of vibrations, has its first assignment due this Friday. This is the homework I was referring to when I said I spent six hours on one problem and still couldn't get it. Seriously. We were asked to find the complex Fourier series of a function and plot it. I decided to use MATLAB to make the graph. I am very inexperienced with MATLAB, though, and simply could not get it to work. I've been feeling hopeless for the last few days, not knowing how I'll ever figure it out. I've already been to the professor's office hours which were useless since I'm so clueless I don't even know what questions to ask. I didn't know which students I could work with or ask for help. They're all either way smarter than me and already finished (meaning they don't need anyone to work with) or they're not too bright at all and probably couldn't offer me any assistance.
Yesterday, thankfully, one of the other TA's I work with emailed me a file of his MATLAB code to help me out. I found it really helpful and was able to complete the problem after all. I've also discovered that doing my work at my desk in my office is a good strategy. I was given a key to a small room with 5 desks earlier this semester. I hadn't even bothered to go there since I had no use for it. But I got an email saying I needed to make the area look used or else it would get taken away and another department would use the space. So today I tried some of my homework in there. It was great--two other grad students were in there at their respective desks. They're both in my continuum mechanics class. They can offer me help. Also, in the office just next door, another couple people in my classes have desks. They both came over to talk about our homework. I figured out how to do another problem I was having trouble with and in the meantime helped with a few other problems. Instead of trying to do everything on my own, it's like I'm part of a team which makes things a lot easier.
I'd say my mood has switched from defeated to hopeful. I finally feel like grad school's not going to succeed in beating me down; I'm gonna come out on top.
For my continuum mechanics class, we have homework due every Friday. The weekend after we turned in the first assignment, our professor emailed the class saying over half of us had failed. Yikes! We all seemed to be making a common error and he gave us a second chance to turn in the homework the following week. He still hasn't returned the original assignment, so I have no idea how I did. I chose not to redo it because I thought I did it right, thought I don't really know. But now that I don't have any feedback on my previous work, I don't know if I've been continuing to do the assignments wrong after that.
My second class, theory of vibrations, has its first assignment due this Friday. This is the homework I was referring to when I said I spent six hours on one problem and still couldn't get it. Seriously. We were asked to find the complex Fourier series of a function and plot it. I decided to use MATLAB to make the graph. I am very inexperienced with MATLAB, though, and simply could not get it to work. I've been feeling hopeless for the last few days, not knowing how I'll ever figure it out. I've already been to the professor's office hours which were useless since I'm so clueless I don't even know what questions to ask. I didn't know which students I could work with or ask for help. They're all either way smarter than me and already finished (meaning they don't need anyone to work with) or they're not too bright at all and probably couldn't offer me any assistance.
Yesterday, thankfully, one of the other TA's I work with emailed me a file of his MATLAB code to help me out. I found it really helpful and was able to complete the problem after all. I've also discovered that doing my work at my desk in my office is a good strategy. I was given a key to a small room with 5 desks earlier this semester. I hadn't even bothered to go there since I had no use for it. But I got an email saying I needed to make the area look used or else it would get taken away and another department would use the space. So today I tried some of my homework in there. It was great--two other grad students were in there at their respective desks. They're both in my continuum mechanics class. They can offer me help. Also, in the office just next door, another couple people in my classes have desks. They both came over to talk about our homework. I figured out how to do another problem I was having trouble with and in the meantime helped with a few other problems. Instead of trying to do everything on my own, it's like I'm part of a team which makes things a lot easier.
I'd say my mood has switched from defeated to hopeful. I finally feel like grad school's not going to succeed in beating me down; I'm gonna come out on top.
Comments