I can't remember the last time I got a B for my Political Science exam. Come to think of it, never. No, it's not my intention to brag about how good I am in studying Political Science. I just love politics so much that getting good grades for my classes seems natural. Anyway, I got a B for my Politics in SE Asia midterm exam. It's bad enough that graduate students have to take exams for this class, and to make it worse, not doing as well as I should have. It's my academic focus, my area study, for god's sake! It'll be unacceptable to get less than A for this class when I managed to get A's for courses in American, European and comparative politics in general.
Don't get me wrong. I love the professor and I think he's one of the nicest guys around, but I do have a few gripes about the exam, though ultimately it was my own careless mistakes that did me in.
First gripe, there's not enough time. One hour and 15 minutes to do a map test, 7 terms to ID (typically one page for each) and a long essay question that deals with not-so-simple issues. By the time I got to the essay part, there was about 25 minutes left. I wish I had more time writing the essay, so I can come up with a well thought-out structure and make well-reasoned arguments. The essay question I picked was about making a comparative analysis between Sukarno's "Guided Democracy" (Demokrasi Terpimpin) period from 1957 to 1965 and Suharto's Orde Baru regime until 1974. Under normal circumstance, this question would simply be a walk in the park. But having only 25 minutes to write a really good essay is not what one would call normal. I ended up writing a chronological history and the specific events that happened between the 17-year span: chockfull of details and fact but short on substantive analysis. Only in my final paragraph I managed to squeeze in a bit of comparative analysis between the two eras but it was a wee bit late.
Second gripe, too many terms to ID. All told, there were 7 terms that we have to do, and given the amount of time we had, there just wasn't enough time. To add insult to injury, we were supposed to do 2 terms for each country (Indonesia, Thailand, and Philippines) and one mandatory term (about pasisir), but I didn't read the instructions closely and ended up only answering six, instead of seven terms (I only answered one term for Thailand and 3 for Indonesia when only 2 would be counted). Because of this carelessness I lost an easy 5 or 6 points that would have pushed my grade up to an A, or at least an AB. What a dolt! Yeah, I'm cussing myself...
It sort of spoiled my mood for a good part of the day. I was planning to finish the first draft of my 25-page research paper for this class by tomorrow night but I'm feeling so unmotivated right now. I sat in the library with my laptop today for six hours but only managed to write for about half-a-page, which got my page count to 6.5 pages. Very productive, indeed! But I did find a few relevant sources in Bahasa Indonesia that somehow made up for the lack of writing production. Anyway, I'm feeling so much better now, and I'm still planning to stick with my self-imposed deadline to come up with the first draft by tomorrow night.
I am so goddamn tired!!!
4 comments:
This post is cute. It reminds me of myself. We both are complaining about the same thing - lack of time. I'm complaining about how work seeps every seconds of your life away and you just don't have enough time to finish your paper. How old are we again? Maybe we should change places. If I remember correctly, you were the older one.
BTW, it sucks to get that grade if like you said you've been getting nothing but As. But well, regarding the lack of time thing - I remmeber one thing my momsaid to me when I told her the exact same thing in form 2, "Have you asked how the A students managed to find the time??"
Have a good day, Rocket.
Wow, I'm the older one, eh? That's news to me. Anyway, I've came to grips with that very fact now. Thanks for the reminder!!!
For grad students, getting a B is as devastating as getting a D for several reasons. First, all grad students are overachievers. They wouldn't be in grad school if they're not. It means that they are used to getting As all the time. Second, grad students are very competitive. Since we know each other pretty well and sometimes socialize together, we can tell what each other's intellectual ability is, and to be outdone by your collegues can bruise your ego quite a bit. Third, for someone who's focusing on SE Asia, it's simply inexcusable for me to get anything less than an A in this class. Ditto for students of Africa or the EU or American politics.
Anyway, my problem with time is there's not enough of it in a day. But I do think that I manage my time relatively well but at the expense of sleep deprivation and irregular eating time an diet.
God, I cannot wait till the semester's over. 3 more weeks to go!
My problem with time is there's not enough of it in a day...
My sentiments exactly! In fact, I wrote something about this in my online journal:
Which comes to the second point. I've been mulling around with the idea for a long time now, and have often thought it would be amazing if it really happened. We have only 24 hours in a day, and only 7 days a week. But really, who decides that? I mean I always think it is amazing that the whole wide world follows this rule. What if I decided to think outside of the box and state that a day consist of 48 hours and a week consists of 14 days? Isn't it pretty much the same thing? If we stretched them out and have one year consisting of 96 weeks, it will all be the same after all.
Because honestly, I think 24 hours are too short, and 7 days are too limited. I have so many things to do and I do not have enough TIME and days to do them, and they're spilling out into next week but it is all the same. I understand those Roman brothers and Chinese monks that created the calendars didn't have Internet and Soup Kitchen and Office Jobs in those days, but the least they could do was to think about how the future will be so damn packed with options and there's just too short of a time.
If it were up to me, a day would be 48 hours, and nightime would be 14 hours. Now that is because I'm not a night person, and I try to avoid going out into the wee hours because it throws my morning run schedule off track. Working hours would be from 10am to 7pm, where there would be 20 more hours till dusk arrives, which is at 4 pm. Daytime would be divided into two parts - morning and noon, like 6 in the morning, or 6 in the afternoon. If anybody is interested to join forces with me on this and find out more about the hours blueprint, let me know.\
-Rocket
If it were up to me, a day would be 48 hours, and nightime would be 14 hours.
I agree with in you in principle about reforming the time allocation for a day, but I'd like to extend the nightime to at least 20 hrs. I know we talk about this already; you're an early annoying woodpecker and I'm that menacing yet cool night owl. I'm at my most productive late at night and I love to sleep thru the morning.
So, I suggest a 28-hr daylight (14 hrs in the morning and 14 hrs in the afternoon), which means I can spend more time drinking coffee in the morning without having to rush to get somewhere and spill coffee all over myself--try riding a bike on a busy street with swarms of students all around WHILE holding a cup of scalding hot coffee! It also means that I get to play soccer for a bit longer in the late afternoon. When I get home after soccer I can take my own sweet time showering, preparing dinner, etc before I sit comfortably to do my work and realize that it's not even 9pm yet.
Anyway, I'm with you in this whole time reform movement if you can find a way to reconcile our major differences, which are literally night and day!
Imagine that we can now actually realize our aborted plan to go rock-climbing and do that nasi lemak eating contest. No more time conflicts and schedule clashes. Most importantly, no more excuses for you to chicken out of our "little contest."
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