Dateline 4/9

Wow, this has been a busy week. In Fight Club (one of my favorite movies), Brad Pitt says, "self improvement is masturbation" which would make me a world-class wanker recently. I have gone on both studying and fitness binges in the past week, although I doubt either is sustainable. On the fitness side, I have been on a quest to try all the new facilities BU has just opened so in the last week I have swam and ran laps, played basketball and racket ball, and done a lot of strength exercises. On top of that, because there is no one using the fitness room I work at anymore, I have been running on the treadmill extensively while on the clock. I have been running 3 miles at least 4 times a week. On a side note, I found it a lot harder to run the same distance on the indoor track. I am not sure exactly why this is, but poorly measuring the track length (they claim it’s 1/7 of a mile but it looks longer to me) and the treadmill reducing restoring energy in a stride are my chief suspects. Maybe I will go test theory #1 at the actual track center sometime after next week.

On the academic side, I am seriously cramming for the MCAT exam, which I am taking a week from today. This is easily the biggest exam of my life. The dean for advising said that I would need at least a 35 to get into med school (my grades are not wonderful). I have always been good at standardized tests, and there is no reason I could not do it, but if I don't, that pretty much ends my hope of going to medical school. My strategy recently has been to take practice tests, lookup my mistakes, and write them into a notebook, to study. I am hoping to close in on and work on the things that I am still not good at. We will see how it goes next week.

On another school related note, I have to start working on my final paper for my writing class, which is going to be an introspective case study on my creativity. I could not find one single good creative thing I have done so I hope to weave a bunch of different things together. It sounded good in the prospectus, which I literally got up and wrote all of this morning.

On the engineering front, I have a midterm in Control systems next week and all of my classes are getting into very difficult math. (as in MATLAB is required to do the prob sets.) Naturally my copy of MATLAB seems to not work (for root locus plots at least) so I will be spending a lot of time Monday in the teaching lab. Speaking of labs, we have started doing the optics labs in physiology, which are taught my advisor. This means that 1, they will be difficult and 2, I need to do well on them. Moreover, speaking of advising, my course registration time is 8am tomorrow morning (yes, 8am Sunday morning. wtf) so I will be getting a nice early start. Anyway, I can't wait to this semester is over…