Spring break is a mere 2 weeks away! This semester is flying by surprisingly fast. Though this might have more to do with that fact that I’m constantly busy. Next week is going to be pretty brutal: Petrology lab exam on the 15th, Volcanology midterm on the 16th and a Petrology lecture exam on 17th. I almost feel like my fellow friends who are on the quarter system at other schools. That alone would make a pretty intense week of finals.
Lucky me though, I am only on the semester system… this means that we can add more work! So on top of finding time for 3 exams to study for, I also need to write a 10 page paper in Engineering Geology and create a presentation based off of it, which are due on the 16th. Also need to finish a lab and complete a load of work for my group in Quaternary Geology for our grant proposal. Oh yes!
Speaking of presentations, I haven’t heard back from the Office of Graduate Studies yet in regards to my presentation for the student research competition. In the Physical Sciences/Math category, I competed against 3 other people, who were all grad students! I think I managed to hold my own though… 😉 I had quite a few people from class come to check it out and my sister even managed to stop by. That was definitely awesome to have support from both friends and family.
Information Overload
Regarding the overall title of this post, it doesn’t just apply to school, but to my whole life in general at the moment. I was thinking about how much information we have access to at our fingertips and how much amazing it is, yet also time consuming. For example, in my case, I’m a member of many different web communities. Among them: Kuro5hin, Metafilter, PhysOrg, Slashdot, and Wikipedia. Checking each of these sites involves quite a chunk of time (though at the same time I learn quite a lot from them).
I need to find out where I heard a quote that goes something like, “We learn more in a single day than a peasant in the medieval era did in their entire life span.” Sadly, what all this information overloading means is that the day simply isn’t long enough.