Originally, I wanted to go through and read a lot of the addresses, perhaps starting a year or two before the one given at my orientation, and then read all of them through the current year and make some notes about trends and differences in what the stated aims of education are.

This pretty much fell apart after I reread the speech from my year because I found myself with too short of an attention span and a desire to go write a blog post right away. And as a note, loosely, the aim of education is itself, there is no other aim, being more educated is just better, and/or as I vaguely recall from one of the addresses I saw, being more educated makes you a better lover. I’ll try and come back over this next week and actually read through more of them and take notes properly.

Should anybody else feel up to the task though, the addresses can be found in the University of Chicago Record’s archives which are conveniently online in pdf format. Since the aims are given during freshman orientation at the end of September, it’s usually quite easy to identify which volumes/numbers have them.

I’d been meaning to come back to this ever since they decided to put all of the essays online (about 450) in a search-able database. I’ve only looked at a handful of the essays, and like most people I’ve spent most of the time looking at essays looking for people I knew or the winner and runners up.

When I clicked on the link to the winning essay, titled “The Posteverything Generation“, I actually had expected something rather quite different from what was there.

Don’t get me wrong, I think it’s well written, although it struck me as a guy who’s a little too… I don’t know, smug? There some cleverness there but I finished reading it feeling a bit disappointed, and not only because it wasn’t what I had been expecting.

What I had expected, briefly, based on nothing but the title, was something relating to the use of the word “post” as “to bring to public notice” rather than “after”. I didn’t really think about it much more than that before getting to actually reading.

Given the things I’ve seen in the past about our generation being post-privacy, among other things, such as this NYMag feature from a while ago, or in a more general sense, the rise of “transparency” as described in Trendwatching’s “Transparency Tyranny“. Even somebody such as Mark Cuban has posted about how the Internet has changed things with regard to publicity.

I’m not really sure how all of that would have actually tied in to how college has changed in the last few decades, but still, it seemed like it could have been interesting.

Oh well, back to reading some of the non-winners I guess.

Maybe not.

*sigh*

I don’t really know the history of the reading period here, and so I don’t really have any sort of problem with the fact that it’s only two days. I mean, whatever, good enough for me I guess. I hear the reading periods are much longer at some other schools, and similar at others, I don’t really care.

The thing that bugs me, and I imagine most anybody anywhere about reading period is how much it is routinely encroached upon by exams, paper due dates and “optional” meetings of classes in which there is supposedly no new material covered. Actually I don’t think there is new material covered that often, though sometimes, such as for one of my classes now, the class will be presented with an option of having a meeting during reading period, and then we’ll vote on if there will be allowed new material, and while I believe those jerks lost, if they had won, it would be a mind boggling to me that people actually elected to have another class with new material during reading period.

I’m not really sure what can or should be done about this. I mean, every quarter since my very first here, I’ve been faced with these optional meetings of classes and I’ve missed almost none. Sometimes that decision has proven to be the wrong one, because sleeping just that much more would have been so much nicer, and sometimes, something really genuinely helpful was covered in review and I gained a lot from it. I’m still annoyed at a lot of the things that go on during [tag]reading period[/tag], not the least of which are the early take-home exams and papers that seem to be often due for peopld during this period, but… oh well.

I guess with that in mind, I’m going to call this attempt off. After a kind of pathetic 3/4 days depending on how I regard the flight home from Beijing, I’m done. I’m a little disappointed with how I’ve done, and really I don’t think I’ve really come to my complete limit yet, but I’m unwilling to get there as the cost in terms of my classwork would be too great.

So now instead of taking my 10 nap, I’m going to just stay awake for a little bit and get back to a “normal” monophasic schedule.

All told, even this very short attempt I feel was a very informative experience, and I’m quit anxious to give this another shot when I’ve a schedule that is better suited.¬† I am well aware that this kind of schedule won’t just come to me so easily, but, I’m fine with that for now.¬† However, until then, I’m done with this attempt.¬† Back to the grind, as it were.

This isn’t to say I’m experiencing some grand change in plans for what I’d like to be doing a few years from now, because I didn’t even have such a plan in the first place. I’m still looking for a job, and beyond that my plans for next year and the future in general are entirely… mutable.

I was watching Layer Cake the other day, and this one voice-over monologue is coming to mind now. The protagonist was saying something about making a plan and sticking to it. I’ve got a bit of a plan, though it’s not quite thought all the way through just yet. I hope to start with it when I get back to the US. It certainly makes makes for an interesting set of resolutions.

I’m told that Mahatma Gandhi said, “You must be the change you wish to see in the world.” Though admittedly I’m not really planning on changing the world. I mean, I’d like to, but that’s another topic. There’s changes I’d like to make to the world, and then there are changes I’d like to see in myself.

I look at myself now, and I wonder, what kinds of things stop a person from making a big change in their own life? I think an answer that’s pretty generally applicable is that people are afraid of the unknown, worried that whatever they intend to change might end up worse than their current status, and the risk of something worse is enough to dissuade them from trying; like the reward is never great enough to justify the risk.

For example, the whole polyphasic sleep bit would I think constitute a pretty drastic change. It would require some sacrifices and a major adjustment of my activities and how I spend my time. It’d affect my ability to socialize, probably disrupt my circle of friends a bit, preempt going out drinking with people pretty much completely, and certainly not least of all, it’d require me to make some major changes to the way I schedule my days. And if I can’t pull off the switch, well… I don’t want to think that’s an issue. Rather, the act of making the switch would also subject me, and everybody around me, to the entirely not-so-enjoyable situation of me completely sleep deprived for a week, at least.

There might be some health considerations to worry about too. Maybe I really shouldn’t even consider doing this on account of the potential immune system strain, maybe it’d be too much for my heart, to be awake for so much longer. Maybe it’s a stupid thing to try this when still trying to learn things, tucked away in long term memory or whatever.

I think that’s a good start on the possible cost of making the switch. But what is there to be gained? Why would I want to try in the first place? It’s not like I don’t have enough time in a day. I might say I want more time to do things, but a far easier solution would be to simply stop watching so much TV and movies and get the things I want to get done, done. Maybe I just want to see if I can do it, see if I’ve got the self discipline to suffer through potentially weeks of terrible sleep deprivation to emerge bettered at the end. Maybe I want to know if it’s possible, I want to see what it does to me, how I change, how it changes things for me.

I guess that’s sort of part of the motivation for this: it’s a big change. That’s a reward as I see it, in itself. Really the threat of not being able to maintain whatever socializing I had been doing before is hardly a credible threat at all. Lately I’ve been kind of a recluse. I don’t go out, I don’t do anything at all. How’s that saying go, “If you’re bored, you’re boring?” Ok so really changing my sleep schedule doesn’t fix anything, but it is something to do. Or rather, something not to do? I don’t know. I worry that not being able to articulate why I want to do this is evidence that I don’t really want to, but I know that’s not the case. I’m so intensely curious to see what would happen that I’m going to try this at the first chance I get.

Why not today? Why not do this right now? I’m not ready to spend a week being grumpy and unpleasant and possibly miserable in transition while with my family and friends. I was going to start the first week I got back to Chicago, that is, like a New Year resolution in that I’m returning to the US on the 1st of January, but I’ve reconsidered that as well. Pending scheduling an interview for an internship, at least. I basically want to minimize the costs incurred during the transitional period, and completely botching an interview is a pretty large cost to me. It’s kind of pathetic, part of me thinks it’s only an interview for an internship for a quarter or something, while on the other hand, at this rate, if I got it, it might be a great way for me to hopefully and eventually secure fulltime employment with the same company. Thinking about all of this again, there’s no reason I wouldn’t want to give it my best, and I should really do that more often, give my best, that is. That said, my best might not be very good if I’m on 6 hours of sleep over the course of 3 or 4 days.

So with that said, maybe if the interview was late enough in January that I could have a week or two before it happened. The first week or two of the quarter should be as good a time as any, certainly better than during any sort of exams. The homework load tends to be light early as well, I think perhaps on account of the whole add/drop system. That and the courses I’m planning on taking should be more manageable than they have been in the past.

I worry that my diet might, well, not suffer, but change as well. What reading I have done leads me to believe that it might very well be easier generally a good idea to make some significant changes to my eating habits. A drastic reduction in meats and processed foods both is probably a good idea for most anybody, but of particular importance to somebody trying to sleep as little as I’d like to. I don’t have the interest yet to try something so drastic as to switch to a raw-foods diet, but we’ll see how things go when I get started.

I mentioned the so-called Imposter Syndrome because I was talking to a couple people, and noticing that everybody has this impression of me as a good studious student when I feel like that’s really not the case. I use studying as an excuse a lot, to avoid commitments to things I don’t want to do that much or in general just because it’s an excuse nobody will question and affords me the freedom to do what I like with whomsoever I please. Well that’s not entirely true, but you get the point.

As an aside, the wikipedia article linked above is rather unsatisfactory as a reference goes. I’ve been finding the wikipedia pretty wanting as a reference these days actually. I continue to be confused as to why so many people regard it so highly.

Returning to feeling like a fraud, the wording of said wikipedia article is such that it seems like the only people who get to feel like frauds are those who have achieved their success and are then doubting whether or not they’ve actually earned it. I suppose what I was about to lament isn’t really fair, given that I am at this fancy-pants university and have my own so-called achievements to tout, but even still, among my peers I do not feel like I have any great accomplishments to boast of. I feel like an imposter because of the impression that people have of me rather than having actually done anything. When somebody asks me how a test or problem set went, I am reluctant to say how badly it may have gone because I would be embarassed to be revealed as this fraudulent student. Forget “would be”, I am. It’s not that I chalk it up to luck or anything, I just don’t tell anybody how my last assignment or exam was. The answer is almost invariably “fine” or “ok” and if there are questions as to what that means, I can almost always dodge it by simply providing the excuse that I haven’t seen the grades yet, so time will tell. Nobody is ever in a position to follow up because nobody knows when I get my work back graded, only when I have to turn it in.

I’m not sure where I’m going with this, I just got tired of studying and felt like getting these present feelings of fraudulence off my chest. I guess part of it is just thinking that maybe I’m preempting my eventual being unmasked when I can’t get some job because my GPA is too low or something. To quote a differerent article from Psychology Today

Frauds are also very careful monitors of the impression they give off and cues they pick up from others. Starting new jobs, new relationships, and new schools is all the more threatening as impostors sense the high expectations of those around them and know that if they let down their “shell,” they may fail–or even worse, succeed.

I guess it is sort of reassuring to know that this is something that lots of people manage, but at the same time, I don’t know if I really believe that I can be lumped together with the people who think they’re frauds, but aren’t really, while I still wonder if I’m not actually a fraud myself.

So I went and checked mine out, and though I didn’t have any real plans to apply this year, my score certainly cemented that view. After all the practice I did, time and money I spent in the interest of getting a better score, I ended up getting about the same as I did on the very first practice test I ever took, before I’d done any prep at all.

I feel like it’s all been such a colossal waste of time.