Self Motivating
Motivation can be a difficult thing to come by, especially when dealing with a task that you know is going to take several years. For example, I’ve been brushing up on my math in order to test out of as many classes as possible for this summer. Since I have decided to go back for Electrical and Computer Engineering I face the prospect of having to fight with the part of my brain that has atrophied since high school: any part of it dealing with math (and to some extent the hard sciences).
What I need to do is get myself back up to calculus by June, possibly the end of May. This is no easy task when you haven’t touched calc since Spring (possibly it was the prior fall) of ’04. That’s a lot of ground to make up, and I’ve realized I’ve forgotten most of it. So really, I need to cover Algebra, geometry, trigonometry, and calc all over again. Fortunately, I’ve found that The Khan Academy is a great resource when paired with a text book. Essentially, I can blow through the introduction of a chapter and the learning phase in roughly 10 minutes thanks to the instructional videos there, and reinforce the learning with examples in a text book. It’s a great system, and free (plus a book on whatever topic you’re studying). In addition to that, because of the interdisciplanary approach to marine science technology that the program I’m looking at takes, I need to also take chemistry, physics (duh), and biology (and I would assume marine biology) as well.
That is a shit ton of work that I need to be doing. I figure I can only take one math course at a time because they build upon each other, and if I have to go through them all as courses, that’s adding several semesters of time on to the actual learning for the program. That’s time and money that I don’t have. The sensible, smart, and monetarily savvy thing to do is to spend every waking moment that I’m not working (meaning all of them, because I’m not) on math, and following that up with bio/chem/physics. I managed to do this for a few weeks before I burnt out because of the pace I was going at.
My challenge now is to get myself to put pencil to paper again, and just grind on through. It has proved to be far more difficult than I imagined. It is quite easy to push it off until tomorrow, and I mean why not, its not like I have anything going on?
Well, that may be changing. Today, I took the Census test and am essentially guaranteed a job because I’m not drooling from the mouth and am able to drive, understand instructions, and capable of asking people 10 questions. Also, they need more enumerators than they’ll find here on the lower Cape. And the pay is way better than you’d ever get working on a campaign, and you’re only expected to work 8 weeks. That’s not bad. The problem is that if I’m doing this full time, it takes away my learning time, which has fallen by the wayside anyway.
So what I’m proposing is a deal to myself. Starting immediately after this post, my week days need to have a minimum of 5 hours of study, and a half hour of exercise (yeah, let’s throw that in there for good measure). Otherwise, you have to take the census job or another. Why? Because this is my full time job, and it will pay dividends in the not-so-distant future. Also: yes I know it isn’t a week day, I’m atoning for yesterday’s most excellent *insert Bill and Ted guitar riff* display of sloth.
First on today’s agenda: not math, but instead getting my Java take-home midterm out of the way. Then reading one chapter in that text, and moving on to some algebra afterwards.
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