November 29, 2005

Sacred Month

I offer my condolences to my various college friends (and even to those in college who I really don't like) on your entering "the sacred month." It was first referred to as such to me by my old professor Dr. Chen as "the sacred month where students like you do the only real work they intend to do for the whole semester." Now, I know some of you are bogged down simply as a course of the natural progression of the semester, while others have taken the practices of the Cynic to heart, and are just getting into all of the stuff that you should have done months ago.

For the edification of the masses, I will post a list of projects accomplished by me during the sacred month in years past.

Freshman Fall: Bearing in mind that you really don't do much in freshman fall, I wrote both of my little theological treatises for Dr. Woodring, both of which could have been done far sooner than the last week of class and finals. Ah... the joys of freshman year.

Freshman Spring: Like freshman fall, I really didn't have much by the way of actual work to get done... go figure. Ah yes... I did finish that damned bolt. I also studied a lot of Calc 3... pretty much the final for which I was best-prepared in my tenure as an undergraduate.

Sophomore Fall: Ah... Diff EQ and your stupid excercises in homework copying, how I loathe you. I finished 3/4 of my Armstrong Data Structures programs during the last month of the semester. It was also during this stretch that I gave the longest presentation of my college career in P.O.D. I also took the $*%$&% $%&%*$%*$ *$%&$%$* $&&%$$*#$(# $#&% $%&$%$%* P.O.D. Final. I'm not sure I'll ever forgive Batts and DeBoer for that class.

Sophomore Spring: I did a LOT of Bib Lit Journals. I also wrote an entire term paper for Historiography in one day. I would also like to note that it was during this last month that Stu and I walked out of I&M in the middle of Dr. Anazia's yammering. I'm particularly proud of that.

Junior Fall: You will note that up until this point, I had managed to shirk the majority of my workload altogether. It is at this point in one's career that that starts to change. I would like to thank Dr. Varnell for making my draw hundreds of pointless UML Diagrams during the last month of this semester. Dr. Leiffer also gets credit for the most-skipped class of all time where I had a LOAD of work to make up during the last month. I also wrote a decently-long complete BS paper for learning from leaders, and polished off the month with more writing for Inklings and the final from hell in that class. I mean, I was prepared... but 10 pages of writing?!

Junior Spring: You see, I did this one ALL wrong. I had a prophets paper that Woodring made us do for the beginning of April, a 3-parts-in-a-series program for Baas' Computer Theory class that was supposed to be done over the whole semester that I did in the last month, and 3 separate programs for Programming Languages that I did in about the last two weeks.

Senior Fall: Determined to do better than I had in the Spring, I got most of my work done earlier... but I still ended up doing Algorithms and Networks programs late into the last month. This wouldn't have been a problem if I hadn't had a COMPLETE screw-up of a group for Varnell's special IBM class and 2/3 of my teammates for King's Software Engineering class weren't utter... well... I'll be nice: academic deviants. This resulted in my not even seeing Anna the two weeks of school more than 5-10 minutes a day plus (some) meals.

Senior Spring: On the upside, it was this semester that I gave new meaning to passing with doing nothing. Almost nothing done for Architecture, Program Translation and the IBM Project combined... nothing really done for Speech, a decent bit of effort for Watson's Brit Lit II and NOTHING for Racquetball. I mean, hell, it's racquetball. What little I did this semester was mostly the hell of preparing for a wedding/graduation/move/get-a-job. That was fun.

So there you have it.... 8 semesters of slacking, each followed by its own month of furious effort. I feel your pain... and you can keep it.

Posted by Vengeful Cynic at November 29, 2005 07:56 AM | TrackBack