A Mental Exercise
Lucas reflects on some recent things he's grateful for and proud of.
Lucas reflects on some recent things he's grateful for and proud of.
So we’re heading into ninth week, which means a bunch of things. In most classes, everything starts getting pulled together and you start to get the bigger picture of what you’ve been learning, so that’s exciting. On the other hand, finals are approaching, so there’s stress, too. Schedules are getting hectic, which is both stressful and exciting! Anyway, when I can tell I’m about to enter a Big Week like this one, I’ve found it can be helpful to play a bit of a mind game with myself to start things off right, and/or to step back and keep perspective on things whenever the daily ins and outs get to be a little too much.
It’s really cliché, actually, and something I can’t believe I never actually bothered to try until I was a college student, but. Yeah. Learning. Better late than never, I guess. I simply try to look in my recent past and think about something I’m genuinely grateful about. The classic. If I can, I also try to add an accomplishment I’m proud of, because as I’m sure I’ve alluded to countless times on this blog, I can be pretty good at focusing too much on self criticism when I’m not careful.
This week, I thought I’d share my replies to both of these self-prompts. I’ll start with the thing I’m proud of first, because that’s more straightforward.
Basically, I started my physics problem set before the PSF session started, and surprised myself with what I was able to figure out on my own! Recently I’ve fallen into the habit of dealing with my sets in their entireties at the PSF sessions. I’m not sure what changed, maybe it was a bit of (gasp!) unexpected free time, but I basically set up shop in the Libe about an hour beforehand and started working through the problems independently. Eventually I got to a “show that” problem, which basically just means you’re given a bit of information and are asked to derive something else with it. I’m usually terrible at this, and I’m not quite sure why. Part of it, though, is probably that such questions are literally built on filling in gaps and working through confusion with a mix of strategy and trial and error, and I tend to get freaked out when I’m not immediately sure what’s going on.
In this case, I had the fairly simple task of deriving the Lorentz transformation equations from the inverse Lorentz transformation equations. Sure enough, though, I made some cursory attempts (which failed) and quickly got stressed out and frustrated. I was about to give up when, again, something I guess I don’t remember or can’t explain came over me, and I sighed, erased a bit, and explored a new direction. And then I kept doing that for ten minutes. That’s, like, a record for me. I am usually terrible at failing over and over without freezing up and getting discouraged. Eventually, a kind of random and playful idea yielded me results similar enough to what I needed that I did a bit more digging in that direction, and soon enough, I had the equations I wanted. It was an incredible feeling, and I’m really happy it happened. Again, a little late, but better late than never — Lucas’ first derivation!
So yeah. I’m proud of that. And what am I grateful for? An unusual extension!
Basically, I had a four page paper due for my poli sci class due on Thursday, but after outlining my essay response to the prompt, I realized how personal the topic was, and how much I had to say about it. Almost immediately I ended up with a six page *outline* and no idea what to do with it, so I kind of started to panic. Except I guess I didn’t, because the excitement about the topic outweighed my unsure-ness about how to move forward, and maybe that’s where I got my bright idea from.
After thinking to myself how it was unfortunate I would only get to explore this material over four pages until Thursday, when I was pretty convinced I could write an even better, longer paper with a bit more time, I figured I might as well be honest about that with my professor! Usually I’m terrible at that (the asking for extensions thing, not the honesty thing). But this time, I reasoned, if there were anyone who’d be understanding with my weird little dilemma, it’d be Mihaela (shout-out, haha — she is an incredible and challenging professor and I highly recommend taking a class with her).
Turns out I was right! And I’m so grateful that I’m in an environment where I could discover that. Learning to stick to deadlines and page limits is important, but so is encouraging curiosity and creativity, and since I’d already done the four-page thing for a previous paper in the same class, I was given a little room to do more exploring for this one, and for that I am so so grateful. It makes me truly happy to be at a place where I can feel free to ask things like that every once in a while and actually feel heard and understood.
So yeah! Those were a couple of highlights from my past week. I guess I can try to extend them by trying to apply lessons from that week to this coming one: my goals, as of writing this, will be to continue getting more comfortable with independent “guess”work, and to allow myself to advocate and express when I feel strongly about something, I think.
I’ll let you know how that goes!
Lucas is in his freshman year at Carleton, bringing with him a passion for all things nerdy and a talent for overthinking and awkwardness (and self-deprecation). He hails from Pasadena, California, and yes, he realizes it gets cold out here. Currently wildly undecided, he can see himself attempting a Physics and Cinema and Media Studies double major, although Chemistry, Economics, and Computer Science (among many other subjects) have been tempting him as well. He misses his bearded dragon.