Exams

I feel like my 3rd year exams are the peak of exams for me. The era of exams that I’ve been used to for the past 16 years of my life has peaked and would never return in its former glory.

Yet it’s still somewhat difficult caring about it. Exams felt like a game—If I spent time at it I would get good at it and feel good about it. One can argue that all of life is about this feedback loop. It is also difficult to entirely negate the value of the things I learnt through doing exams. Maybe it’s just burnout from this process that has been repeated too many times.

The most effective strategy for me has been to (1) do past papers in addition to easy exercises in a variety of textbooks and (2) find anything interesting in the syllabus that could be turned into a blog post. (2) is extremely time-ineffective if the goal was to get better grades, but I feel like in the long term it definetely nets me the most value.

For a while, I genuinely struggled to care about it. We all know that exams are not a great indicator of much. Yet, at some point I really felt that anyone who understands the material should be able to at least get a decent grade. And so I tried harder, well, as hard as I think I should anyways.

Split identities

I have been thinking for a while about where this blog stands. Ultimately, this blog is some imperfect reflection of my own identity. For as long as I pursue mathematics academically, this blog’s home page will be about maths and “non-maths” will be on the nav bar. Yet what if I do something else? What if I went into tech, or finance, or whatever?

I suppose I shouldn’t let this blog stop me from redirecting my interests. Yet to spin it more positively, it makes me wonder how my past experiences can contribute to what I’m doing now. How do I make my life more holistic?