Tuesday Dec. 9

1.     Tuesday Dec. 9

a.     Woke up late, ate breakfast at the 8 with Brandon, studied for compsci. Shot some hoops at Denny Field to relax myself before the test.

b.     Ate some gorp on the way to my CSE final. Hustled upstairs and drank some water. Walked into Kane 120 for, presumably, the last time. Arranged my pencils neatly on the desk.

c.      The bell rang. I plunged into the exam like a bath of cold water, sharpening my mind and intensifying my focus.

d.     Halfway through the exam, I began to fear I would not finish, but these fears were unfounded. The last two problems were not horribly difficult as I thought they would be. Finished the exam with time to spare and blunder-checked myself twice.

e.     Returned to the dorm. I had planned to straight-up study physics, but Brandon convinced me to come to office hours held by my physics professor, Garcia, to ask some of the questions we had raised “studying” a few days ago. Grabbed free finals ice cream from Rick’s and headed down to the CENPA labs below Haggett where Garcia held his office hours. We actually got to ask a few questions, and we worked on the bizarrely difficult but interesting practice exam. We got into an interesting debate with an East Indian dude, Ayush, about one of the problems in this exam, which I think I eventually solved; there turned out to be an awesome connection between a perfectly inelastic collision, where a amount of kinetic energy is lost equal to half the lighter particle’s energy when viewed in the lighter particle’s frame, and our problem, where this is found to be true for sand hitting a belt.

f.      Ate dinner at the 8 (Taco Tuesday!) with Ayush. Talked about his prior experiences with physics in India and how the Indian education system works.

g.     Finally made it back to the dorm and knuckled down with my two practice exams. The more difficult practice exam unsettled me, but I eventually figured out all the problems. I still made a few mistakes on the easier practice exam, but chalked them down to a lack of focus, since I understood the material.

h.     Tried to get to bed early for the 8:30 physics final. Ended up tossing and turning restlessly, but eventually slept.