Day 5

Writing a blog about how busy a Cambridge term is doesn't work if you are too busy to write it.

Or maybe that fact alone conveys more than I could ever say using words?

Anyway...

Fear not, this series of "A week in the life of..." will be completed, however, as you'll probably have noticed, my original plan of writing one blog post a day has sort of slipped.

However, we shall continue on, for in the land of blog, it is now Day 5.

Before I start the meat of this post, I would like to say that these views are perhaps not representative of some Engineers, who have god given problem solving skills and may in fact be the pan-dimensional beings mentioned in the Hitchiker's Guide to the Galaxy. So take from this what you will.

Examples papers.

They are to undergraduate engineers what the stone blocks of the pyramids were to the Egyptian slaves. Under the metaphorical whips of our supervision timetable, we engineers slave deep into the night pondering the answers to questions which we were told we can do, but, really, actually, cannot.

Group a collection of engineers together, and the topic of conversation will assuredly arrive at these A4-ified incarnations of hell. As if it wasn't enough not to be able to do them, we then have to talk about them during our free time because well, we haven't done anything else in the last x number of days and so, that is the only topic of conversation at hand.

To be honest though, at first glance, they appear to be harmless; only a few sides of A4 printed with a collection of an average of 10 questions. However, therein lies the first subtle warning; easy questions do not take pages of A4 space.

Unfortunately, there is no second warning. It's like driving on a motorway and seeing a little blinking yellow light at the side of the road. And then you crash into a giant mound of poo.

If you ever pick up one of these examples sheets, you may be tempted to tell me that it's not all bad - they have some easy questions (marked by a cross), some normal questions, and then some hard questions (marked by a star) - sounds like a sensible progression.

Well, you'd be wrong. I actually interpret those question markers as being there to indicate how stupid I will feel when I subsequently can't do it, having put the heavy weight of expectation on my intellectually slender shoulders.

Cross - Absolute idiot. The exit is that way.
Normal Question - Lose some confidence in your abilities as an engineer.
Star - Well, its not too bad. You'll be made to look stupid in the supervision though.

Let's note here, when I say "Can't do it.", I don't mean having looked at the question and been unable to immediately come up with an answer, I mean having bashed my head at it for 3 hours...not literally though; that would be a less than optimal way of answering questions.

Now, one of these papers sounds bad enough. But actually in the course of a term, an Engineer will have to do roughly two or three a week (they can take anywhere from 5 hours to ∞), with supervisions, which are one hour sessions of two students to one supervisor, to make sure that you are keeping up. The sheer amount of work is compounded by the fact that very often, one will be doing these questions when hungover, or at 5am (my favourite time of the day) to be handed in the following morning - not exactly at the height of ones intellectual prowess.

Still, an all-nighter still beats peeing on work you've already done whilst drunk, and having to re-do it from scratch as the urine washed away all the ink.

I doff my proverbial hat to one of my friends, who has done just this.