The Lent Term Experiment

As I returned to Cambridge on Saturday, I was inevitably immediately buried in the mound of coursework which I should really have completed over the holidays. Thankfully, that's all been done and handed in (as of today).

Still, I wondered what the hell I did with all those weeks that we had off. In my mind, I seem to recall spending a lot of it working, or at least thinking about work, moaning about work and generally not having a very good time of things.

So, to clarify whether Cambridge really does just suck up all your free time as an Engineering Student, or whether I was just having one of my bouts of procastalazyslackitis, which is an unfortunate acute chronic condition I suffer from, I have decided to track what I spend my time on for the coming term.

Broadly speaking, I will be keeping a log of how I spend my time, which I hope to post up on this blog in the form of some pretty line charts, for your perusal.

So, without further ado, here are the results from Week 0. There are five major categories:

1. Total Course - Includes all lectures, work, the 4th year project etc.
2. Total Activites - Includes all sports and socialising etc.
3. Total Free Time - My spare time (currently all being spent on GT5, and boy is it worth it!).
4. Sleep - Yeah.
5. Total Time - Sum of all the time above, this probably won't come to 24 hours, unless I somehow spend an entire day not eating anything (unlikely) and not travelling anywhere etc.

What am I hoping to accomplish by running this time keeping experiment, you may ask.

Apart from a curiosity to track how I really spend my time, I hope it will just turn out to be an interesting view into how much time the 4th Year Cambridge Engineering course takes out of a student's life, which, after all, is part of the point of this blog.

I don't really have any hidden agendas - I mean, if it does turn out I spend a disproportionate amount of my time doing work, I'm not going to print it out and throw it at the Undergraduate Teaching Office in protest, no matter how tempting that may be.

Anyhow, I shall attempt to keep this going throughout the term, and inform the world of my goings on with weekly updates. Fear not though, if you are worried that this blog will turn into nothing more than a series of depressing line charts saying "4TH YEAR ENGINEERS WORK A LOT", for I am still planning to write regular blog posts here and there.

So, strap yourselves in, we're in for a wild ride!

...

In the metaphor above, the phrase "strap yourselves in" means "do whatever you want", and the the phrase "we're in for a wild ride" means "at best, this could be mildly amusing".

The appropriate image would be doing laps of the Top Gear Test Track in an electric wheelchair. Yes, that's right.

Peace out.