GRE FAIL, Thesis All-Nighters, Forgotten Midterms, and Other Happenings

Posted by Unknown , Monday, October 20, 2008 2:38 AM

Oh, hectic I am.

So many things have happened in the last few weeks that it's hard to recount them all, so I won't. However, there are a few major things.

• The GRE and my inability to speak of it without great acrimony (thanks, GRE guide makers, for giving me over 490 of the most often recurring words on the GRE and it being completely useless in application): Without disclosing too much, the GRE is hard. Though I only studied for a day, I came out ahead of where I could have been, but I can't help feeling that $140 I spent wasn't worth the plastic I put it on. We'll see once I start hearing back from grad schools. There's always window-washing if things don't work out, I s'pose.
• Two all-nighters later, and I have somewhere around half of my thesis done: You may think that I've done well from that alone, but keep in mind that the rough draft was due last Monday. God, someone shoot me. I just want it to write itself already. It almost literally does except for pesky things like "continuity" and "chronology."
• The "Oh-my-God-how-does-someone-forget-a-midterm-*headdesk*" moment: I'm varying back and forth between being disgusted and being apathetic about this, but I let a Monday-after-Fall-Break midterm sneak up on me and bite me pretty hard. From the looks of the study guide, I could wing it and make a passable grade (the first identification term is "Hernando de Soto" - hellooooo, sixth grade!), but why on earth do I need to take that chance. I'm filling out the study guide and studying before class tomorrow, but I am not happy that I forgot.

I've had an otherwise eventful weekend, but it's been one of those survive-now-and-live-to-tell-the-tale type weekends. I will say that it's been one of my most interesting as well as one of my most (negatively) enlightening weekends of my life, and that's excluding the GRE.

I'm planning on starting either a new blog or posting a new page with .pdfs of some of my work (papers and such) so that grad schools have URLs to access my presented-but-unpublished papers and articles. What do you all think? .PDFs and a new blog, or .PDFs on this blog? My only worry about this blog is the possibility that it's inappropriate. I don't think it is too much so, but it is certainly not professional. Let me know what you think soon so I can take your thoughts into account when I decide this week.

Oh, and the top five list changed.

1. UT at Austin
2. Vanderbilt
3. OU at Norman
4. Ole Miss
5. Duke

Now to contact professors in each history department! Hurray for the most time-consuming high-risk activity I've done thus far in my academic life.

Edit: Also, a review of the Fall movie Blindness is up at VDCC.