I have been with the books. That is to put it mildly with no exaggeration. My days and thoughts have now broken into the following neat pieces
- Studying
- Thinking of studying and what to study
- Thinking of life once I am done studying
My struggles with both Quant and Verbal continue and all past sins of my school days when my cocky self thought I could skate by the theory has come back to bite me (yes, you know where). That said, my quant studies have me feeling amused on some days and tearing my hair out for habits I cannot outgrow, on others. Now, somewhere between 6th grade and 8th grade, my love for math went down from a certain amount X to 0.000X and by the 10th grade it was tending to 0. There were many factors. My teacher sucked and I was able to compensate my dwindling math score by increased interest in other sciences and humanities. Of course, that I could ever, in my wildest dreams, want to be an engineer (like my Dad? No way!) or do an MBA/MS (uh what?!), was a possibility that didn’t come into play.
But I did know that given the Indian education system, a less than 80% score in Math was equal to flunking. Most people I knew actually considered anything less than 95-99% akin to failing, so 80 was like my safety net to just save face. On the other hand, I knew that CBSE (Board of Education that conducted our exams) had some absurd ways of giving us some points for being a sport and attempting questions in the paper. Some of the things that I remember and which helped me through school were:
- Writing “hence proved” or “QED” at the end of theorems or LHS = RHS, that you proved got you 0.5
- Writing the equation and the first line of simplification such as remove parenthesis/apply BODMAS (PEMDAS) rule got you 0.5-1 depending on the question
- A text explanation of the next step e.g. “when we combine the above, we get” etc. got you 0.5
As I read through my current notes and the few pages where my “100 marks” and “Q51” scoring TH has scribbled on the pad, I can’t help but notice the number of complete sentences that I use to solve (not just explain to myself) math vs the crisp numbers and symbols that show TH’s process.
If only this story writing in Quant helped my Verbal scores, life would be perfect eh? 😐
Among other things, less than 3 weeks to go for this part of the process to end. Who’s pumped?! 😀
Coffee Beans And Tea Leaves 