To be quite frank, I am really disgruntled about school. Midterms were two weeks ago. I did poorly (48/130) on one, which I expected. Since the class grades were low (I was about the 35th percentile) the professor offered a chance to do the same exam as a take-home in order to regain credit for half the points missed. I said, "Sweet! I can make up for not learning anything so far!" So I proceeded to work like a dog over the next week to get it right. I put a lot of time and effort in and was confident in the work I had done. He posted the grades today (just the numbers, not the tests themselves) and I earned a whopping 5 additional points. Not exactly what I was expecting. More like 30. Now I have to figure out what I did wrong (aside from taking this professor a second semester in a row) and how badly I have screwed myself, i.e. can I dig my way out of the hole I am in.
Since I am doing poorly this semester and kind of hating my academic life, I decided not to take two classes in the fall. Instead, I will take one each in fall and spring, pushing my graduation date back to May of 2008. This seems a perfectly acceptable situation to me. I'd rather take an extra semester and leisurely finish my education over two semesters than rush through and have it be a painful experience for one more.
On the other hand, work has been going very well. I am working on a section of one project that involves translating a computer program from Visual Basic to C++. I predicted the process would take about a month of pretty steady work. Thanks to the clarity and meticulousness of the VB author and my own coding skills, I am nearly done after only two weeks and the initial results indicate that my work will result in a speed of a couple hours rather than a few days. Funny, this stuff is what I am best at, but I never had any formal training or schooling to speak of. I took one semester of programming in Rolla and got a C+. I wish the stuff I was doing at school was this interesting and intuitive.
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