So there's this test tomorrow...

I don't feel like I've studied enough but at the same time I'm unsure how much more I can prepare. I understood the lectures, I've read the notes a few times now, and I've been doing practice problems and still I feel like I'm really not that well prepared for it. Maybe looking at some past exams will help me convince myself I'm prepared?

It might be because this past weekend got eaten up by another class's assignment, and today got eaten up by work and studying for another class's quiz. (Taking this many courses is difficult without also working, but combine working and it's a bit much.) I don't know, I guess I'm just used to studying for midterms by devoting time directly before the midterm, and because the time has been stretched over different days in different weeks, it feels like it's not enough, even if it's the same amount of hours.

It might also be because I found the assignment easy (long, but easy). As in, I was expecting it to be super gruelling and challenging and impossibly difficult, and was surprised when it actually wasn't all that bad, really, and I was able to do it on my own. Well, I say this now, but the marks haven't come back yet.

I guess we'll find out tomorrow.

Studying for Tutorial 1

This came up on the Wednesday night before our first tutorial quiz (I’m in the Thursday night section). I was mildly worried about it although (for me anyway) it wound up being much easier than I anticipated. I usually find that if I overworry, I overprepare, and that makes me do better, though, so I’m not so unhappy about overworrying because everything goes better than expected. This is the one benefit to being a giant ball of nerves.

Anyway, because I was such a ball of nerves I got a friend to quiz me with induction proofs that he’d yoinked off the internet so that I hadn’t seen them before. The proofs were of varying difficulty. One of them was the standard sum-type sort: 

which is easy enough once you get the trick of splitting the summation into terms that can be induction-hypothesised (from base case to n) and extra terms (the n+1th term). Then it’s straightforward algebra to combine the two into something that looks like the induction hypothesis but with a quick change of variable n -> n+1.

The other was one that looked like:

which we saw later in I think the third week or so, and here you’re supposed to use the fact that the relation LessThan is transitive (so for A < B, and B < C, you know certainly that A < C) and a term-by-term comparison to show the B < C part. Then you’re essentially done. 

Anyway, the rest is less a discussion about the proofs themselves and more about my ridiculous anxiety issues, which I really wish would just go away!