Thursday/Friday – Day 140/141
Posted on 19th December 2012
Today was the first of my two exams, algorithms. Up at 7:30 to practice I felt decently good going in. The exam felt fine and though there were lots of tricky questions, it seemed alright overall. How naive I was.
The rest of the day was spent in crisis mode going mad over the physics exam which, till this point I’d barely had any time to study. I was so stressed that I decided to take a ‘short’ nap and get back to studying after. This name however, ended up running overtime to a good four hours. No good. The rest of the evening I was even worse than I was before, going completely nuts over the practice exams. At around eight PM I received my grades for the algorithms exam. Not good. I was quite upset by this and so I decided to take a run and clear my head a little. At 9PM I finally started working consistently and though I made some progress, I was sure it wasn’t enough.
Tomorrow I woke up at six thirty, before my nine AM exam feeling absolutely terrible and my nerves were completely wracked. I entered the exam in a state of near panic and with good reason, I was unable to wholly answer a single one of the exam questions! After exiting the exam room in near tears I was also forced to confront another unpleasant event from the last day, the burglary of my carry bag containing my forms to obtain a new visa. Quite distraught I left the exam building to find Kostas, my algorithms professor who always had a way of putting things in perspective however, he was busy with a skype call and couldn’t meet with me. I ran back to my room to try and prepare for my weekend in New York with Mum, Dad, and Raph. I distressed slightly during a goodbye with Steph, who gave me a little comfort from the awful day and then I raced to the 1PM bus to New York.
Long story short, it took absolutely forever. I only just made it there in time for Shabbat. 4:11 I made it to the building. 4:11 Shabbat started. Phew. From there it was breakdown then sleep.