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Thursday, February 27, 2014

midterm madness

I'm almost done my two-week hell, aka midterms. I've been a complete mess of stress for about 16 days and I'm sure a therapist would prescribe me for a serious dosage of Xanax if I asked for it. I feel like I've had only relatively small amounts of work to do so far this semester. I mean I've had work to do, don't get me wrong, but I wasn't doing much more than weekly readings and assignments. Then at the beginning of February I looked at my calendar and thought, "Holy f*&cking sh*t". I had 4 tests and 3 papers coming up in the next 3 weeks.
my second home (aka the Ugli)

Me, being the stressed out, control freak, overachiever that I am, immediately began making study guides, outlining possible essay answers and hyperventilating that I was going to have absolutely no time to do anything. I go to the library quite often because it's easy to get distracted while doing work
if you live with 75 other girls, but I've spent so much time at the library in the past two weeks that I think I should start paying rent.

Here's what was my schedule looked like for the month of February:

  • February 11th: Comm 271 Critical Analysis Paper
    • I've honestly never had such a confusing paper assignment in my life. The prompt literally asked us to answer 15 questions, but only one of them was supposed to be our thesis. I've already written and turned in the paper (clearly, since it's almost March) and I still don't understand what the paper was asking me to write about. We had cite abstract articles that were filled with mumbo-jumbo theories that have since been discredited. Sounds legit, right? 
  • February 19th: Comm 121 Midterm
    • This test came straight from hell. And it's not that I didn't study. Because I studied a shit ton. I'm almost embarrassed by the amount of hours I spent studying because c'mon... how hard can an introductory Comm class be? Let me tell you. It can be really freaking hard. Basically every class session is spent with my professor reading word-for-word the powerpoint she's prepared at an extremely fast pace. So basically for the past two months I've been listening to her read long-ass definitions of all these terms. So how do I study for the test? I memorize what all the terms mean, write down examples and figure out why it's important to know this for a Comm class. But then we take the exam and everything is application of the terms. Not what does this mean, but rather read this article and tell me where this term and that term are being applied. UM WHAT. If that's what I was going to be tested on, maybe you should have been teaching me how to apply the terms rather than reading your fucking definitions so fast that it sounded like you were on fast forward. So after me stressing out for two weeks and studying my ass off, I took an exam that tested me on absolutely nothing I had been taught to do. But guess what?! I got my grade back this morning and I got an A-. I'm honestly not sure how because I seriously thought it was the hardest exam I'd ever taken, but I'm not going to question it because this is the best miracle ever.
  • February 25th: History 261 Quiz #2
    • It's worth a lot of points so in my mind it's sort of a mini-exam and they grade really hard because they're looking for specifics 
    • I have to study key terms from the last 3 weeks of lecture as well as important ideas from two books (one of which is the most horrible book I've ever read called Mexican Chicago)
  • February 26th: Comm 121 Critical Analysis Paper Due
    • So after being completely mind-fu*cked by my Comm 121 test I had to spend my week using the bullshit terms my professor taught me to analyze an advertisement
  • February 27: Comm 271 Midterm
    • This is for my other Comm class and the test wasn't that hard, but the key terms that we had to define were a little more abstract than I would have thought. The essay portion was kind of confusing just because the prompt was long and we had 45 minutes to answer like 3 different questions. 
  • February 28: History 202 Paper
    • 4 page paper analyzing 3 paintings on Indian-American relations in the West; probably my easiest assignment this month. 



It's the 27th today and I just have to add in citations to my History 202 paper and edit it one last time & then I'm done midterms! Wish me luck!



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