So when I finished my prelims 2 weeks ago today I was told that the faculty have 2 weeks to grade them, and that some of them would take the entire 2 weeks, and that I would get an email with the results when they'd all been graded.
...
So...
...any minute now?
And I have all these really cool thoughts about prelims that I want to record and remember - about the studying process, and what the week was like, and the priesthood blessing I got the Sunday before they started, and how I didn't panic all week, and how t.i.r.e.d. I was that whole week even though I slept good hours and ate good meals, and how just COOL it was to realize that I KNOW STUFF about my field...
And I really wanted to write these thoughts all out before I get my results, since the really good feelings about it all are NOT connected to my results since, did I mention that I haven't gotten my results yet?
So here's the quick summary, since I'm tired and I want to go to bed. :)
I felt good about my prelims. :)
I think the hardest part was between exams (there were 4 different exams, 4 days in a row), when I realized how much adrenaline had been pumping through me during the exam itself and when I thought about needing ANOTHER and then ANOTHER and then ANOTHER chunk of that same amount of energy to just power through each exam.
Were the exams hard? Well, yeah, but I also feel like I was pretty well-prepared. I took time at the beginning of each exam, after I had read the question, to outline and organize my thoughts about the topic, and to list who I was going to cite to make my points, and guess what?! I HAD thoughts to organize for each topic and I HAD people to cite - I didn't blank out, which was cool! - I know some stuff! :) And then after outlining, it was a matter of writing as fast as I could to just power through the rest of the 3-hour block of time for that day. THAT was exhausting.
I felt REALLY blessed during the last 10 days of prep and the week of the exams. I know that a lot of people were praying for me - THANK YOU!!! - and I really felt crazily calm about it all, which was a HUGE deal to me. I was given some really meaningful counsel in the blessing that I got before the exams, and that was a great way to start the week and good guidance throughout.
Anyway, this isn't all that I wanted to record about this time period, but some of it will go in my journal, and I may share more here later.
But now I need to go to bed...so that I can get up in the morning...and check my email...
:)
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3 comments:
So, yeah, I guess you're learning that faculty DO NOT exist in the same temporal continuum as grad students. See, you all know that time is not constant - it is variable depending on speed and gravity, but what you didn't know is that mental speed affects time's passing as well.
So, two weeks to us profs, whose minds turns at a rate approaching C (as in E=MC^2), is something akin to... well... infinity for grad students.
:)
Actually, the real explanation is that we face no repercussions for violating deadlines, so we do it. In fact, we finish *more* of the stuff *we* think is important, so there's actually some reinforcement going on.
Oh, wait. I forgot that linguists reject behaviorism...
See, what's really going on is that, given the contextually-bound nature of learning, graduate students, who experience legitimate periphery involvement, lack the tautological intellective skills(e.g., competencies of abstraction) to comprehend the (re)construction of deadlines. The systemness of their metacognition waffles between the secondary and tertiary stages; they have yet to springboard into the quaternary level.
In other words: Profs ar jerks who just don't care.
I don't think "systemness" is a word.
Actually, it is in sociocultural theory. All of those terms I pulled out of SC papers. "Systemness" comes from...
Beniger, J. R. 1986. The control revolution: Technological and economic origins of the information society. Cambridge, Mass: Harvard University Press.
which was cited in Brichall & Roda's chapter in Cole's Cultural Psychology: a once and future discipline (1997).
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