Crimsonietta.net

I don’t know what to do anymore. No matter how hard I study, how much fun I give up to focus on my studies, how much I try my hardest at everything, how many practice problems I do, how many office hours and tutoring sessions I attend, how many classes I go to and actively learn, I don’t think I can pass physics for this semester.

I studied pretty much every day from Saturday to Thursday. I had 200 practice problems to do and completed nearly half and could explain them to you perfectly. I knew the concepts, I knew the math. I took the test and didn’t panic. I actually worked through it and felt good about it. Then test scores came out, and it’s so bad you don’t even want to know what it is. As in, it’s probably about half of what my second test score was, it’s so bad. As in, less than 25. out of 100.

(So all of you whiny elitists who cry because you got a 60, shut the hell up. Please. You have no idea what some of us are going through, and every time you complain because you got “only” a 55 or “not as well as you hoped”, it just rubs it in and makes it even harder.)

I hate these doubts. Doubts that I’m not MIT material, that they made a mistake in accepting me. I keep on being a disappointment to my parents and my professors and even to my former HS teachers; though I’ve tried so hard, studying ten times as much as I did in high school, and I can’t even get a third of the results. I guess I’m nothing more than another stupid kid who’s way out of her league. Why am I even here? I thought that if I studied hard enough and worked hard enough then I would be able to at least pass this test, but for some reason the world doesn’t work this way. There’s no one to go to for help - everyone acts as if it’ll be alright, or as if I’m stupid, or as if they think I know the material when I really don’t.

I just… don’t know what to do anymore.

5.111 chemistry test results in 10 minutes. Crap.

EDIT: Passed! =) Not with flying colours, but I wasn’t hoping for much, so yay, I’m relatively happy compared with the brutal 8.012 beating this morning.

One word: 8.012

Full stop.

I scrambled out of bed around 2:10, woken by Jason’s texts to ask whether the Arch Linux install party was still a go for today. 10 minutes later, Wei poked his head in my door to confirm this, and within 15 minutes we were all in his room, connected via ethernet cables and install disks in our laptops, ready to go.

Wei’s excited about this one =D

The installation took off in all its eager splendor, but before long Wei had to drop out due to a dying laptop charger. No power source = drained battery = no laptop for classes during the week. With a regretful sigh, he switched off his laptop and pulled out a box of maple frosted shredded wheat cereal to contemplatively munch on. Fail #1.

I had chosen my Compaq to install Arch on, but alas, I had gotten through partitioning and was planning to install packages… only no packages could be found. Instead, I received the error “Expected: at least 7 tokens for” though I had clearly defined my mirror and connection. After about 30 minutes of trying, I gave up in exasperation. Not only had I not been able to install Linux, I had wiped the partition that GRUB was on, so now nothing boots at all. Will have to fix this later will one of my other LiveCDs, haha. Fail #2.

Jason, however, had managed to get his installation complete. We waited eagerly as he rebooted his laptop, hoping to see the glory that was Arch Linux. We inched closer, holding our breaths, hoping that at least a small fraction of this would be successful..

… it wasn’t. Installation failed, and with that, this was the third strike and we were done. This was not a triumph.

failed installations make Jason cry

Truly a disaster; at least I was productive yesterday to make up for it. Although I gave up dinner in Chinatown and two apparently excellent movies, I managed to get part of 8.012 done along with some side projects and goals. The picture below was taken circa 8pm or so, when I decided that dinner would probably be a good thing.

that is grapefruit juice in the martini glass, just fyi