A new Way of Working

When I first came here, I was very nervous, very uncertain of how I would do academically. I don't come from a rich family, and quite a few people besides myself have made big sacrifices for me to be here. It adds to the pressure to do well, and so does the need to keep my marks up to retain my scholarship.

I'm in Math and Computers, and before I came here I always took the view that I had to understand everything completely before I would be ready for a test or more particularly for an exam. Absolutely everything had to be completely clear. But I was in a couple of classes that forced me to change that attitude. No matter how hard I tried, some things just refused to come clear in the way I needed them to. But talking to other people, I realized that they were no better off than I was, except that it didn't seem to bother them much. Actually, it didn't seem to bother some of them at all. A friend who's in Physics explained to me that there are some things, like Quantum Mechanics, that actually can't be understood in a concrete or intuitive way at all. Like the electron spends a good portion of its time here, and here, but in a place half way between: zero percent of its time. So how does it get from one place to the other? The answer is amazing: "The equations don't tell us anything about that." In other words, a cop out! And it's the best anyone can do. Likewise light and all other waves: they are waves, but they're particles at the same time. Huh? Well, there's no-one who can explain it, and no-one even seems to want to try. Another cop-out!

Well, if they can do it, so can I. Instead of trying to understand things, I asked myself the question: "what are they going to need me to do? Mostly it was solving a bunch of problems, or being able to do a bunch of proofs. I looked at what was going to be on the test or the exam, and made sure I could do all the things that would be there. Understanding it: well, I'm not sure. But it makes me a lot less anxious: I can actually eat things the same day as the test! And guess what: my marks haven't suffered at all; in fact they're even a bit higher than before.

And before, I quit a course, and most of the time wasn't sure that I could go on at all. Now: a whole lot better.