the corner office

All done. Not such a great exam run this year. What I'm doing now boils down to maths and more maths, and if there's one thing I should know by now, you can't cram maths. Cramming is a strong word, though, I've been working near flat-out for almost 3 months. Still, it was too little too late. Getting a cold two days before the first exam didn't help either.

I suspect the papers wouldn't have felt as difficult for people who've come through an undergrad Decision Sciences degree - comparing to my Com Sci honours exams, I realised you develop a feel for what a department's papers are going to be like, what lecturers are going to ask and how they're going to do it. The first two papers were disasters - I'd focused on the wrong stuff, expected the wrong styles of questions, I hadn't anticipated the sort of pace you're expected to work at, misjudged what 'open book' would imply, even silly things like having my calculator programmed for grunt work. By today I had a good sense of what to expect though, went in ready and it went OK (I hope). Pity about the first two papers, though...

Regardless, I still want to finish this thing off in 2010, and it's going to be a push. I've registered for this year's subjects already, and after a bit of R&R, it'll be back to the grindstone. Slow and steady is the plan, a repeat of this past year's drama is likely to see the missus phoning up the university and deregistering me.