Lessons learned from a difficult second trimester

I thought that it would be fine: taking a casual reading course to prepare for a hopeful summer research project, and taking the second sections of two math classes on grades that were rumored to be harder than the first or third sections.

Then I got 2 jobs, and started teaching Athemath classes again, and the research thing turned out to take more time and mental energy than I had expected, and the two “hard” math classes turned out to actually be hard, and being a rookie freshman I didn’t really know how to deal with all of this… so eventually there wasn’t much time for sleep anymore.

January was extremely chill, partly because the Eaton Fire basically cancelled a week of classes. I had comparatively a LOT of free time, and was able to leave large portions of my schedule unplanned; spending some evenings randomly with my dorm. I think we learned three times as much after midterms than before midterms.

Slowly the courseload started ramping up… I was convinced that February would be one of the most difficult months of college, because of the second half of the trimester being difficult, but even more so because I was dreading my Putnam score coming out; I thought that I had done terribly on Putnam. Actually, it ended up not as bad as I had feared, and I was satisfied with my result. I got into a relationship in early February, which made everything better. Around February 20th, I concluded surprisingly that February would actually be one of the best months of my life, rather than one of the worst.

And then things got messier. I pulled my first academic all-nighter that was planned in advance; I had planned that I wouldn’t have enough time to get stuff done during the daytime, so I’d spend the night working. I got slightly behind on my very fast-moving two hardest classes (abstract algebra and analysis). And once you get slightly behind, you get so much less from the lectures and end up relying on the textbook so much more -- which is so much less efficient in terms of the speed at which I soak up information. (I’m a very slow textbook reader.) I kept going to lectures hoping that I’d get a little bit out of them, which I did -- I caught some of the key terms and had a sense of what part of the textbook was being covered -- but lectures became only 10% as useful to me as they used to be.

March turned out to be significantly harder than February. I survived on coffee and was only half-conscious some days; conscious enough that I’d be able to do homework and read textbooks and have basic-level social interactions with people, but would somehow start to feel really sleepy upon going to a slightly boring lecture. I started listening to only pop music because I needed the motivation and energy boosts, and listened to so much that my ears got a bit clogged so I had to get that fixed… (and to balance it out, I have not listened to music since spring break started!)

During the last few weeks of the trimester, I had essentially no time to socialize in-person, apart from working on homework problems with my classmates. At first I was pulling academic all-nighters once a week and getting enough sleep the rest of the time, but during the last week I averaged under 5 hours of sleep per day -- and still, I was behind in my classes. I knew that I wasn’t near the top of the class in abstract algebra or analysis, while I felt like I should be in order to prove myself to the professors and the other math majors. I thought that I was completely cooked for finals. There was a light at the end of the tunnel though, because I only had to survive two weeks more of this… one week more… a few days more…

I was fortunate enough to have friends to rant and cry to -- my dorm “personal chat”, (which is essentially a blog in chat form), became despair-filled brain dumps with the random happy stuff of my life sprinkled in between. I finally understood what my DiscoTech host had meant when she told me half-jokingly not to go to Caltech because I’d become depressed here. I remember being taken on a student-led tour when I was a prospective freshman, and the student pointing out a balcony where she often cried. I didn’t completely grasp it then -- surely not everyone has a really hard time, right? -- but then I saw it happening to the sophomores and freshmen around me, and myself included, and it became more real than ever. I’m thankful that I at least had a hint of what was going on before coming here though, so that it wasn’t completely a surprise.

My supportive friends and experience with math olympiads ended up carrying my mental state. My dorm friends and I would give each other the strength we needed to keep going, sometimes calling each other “soldiers”. When other people acted too optimistic about my situation, I’d sometimes get annoyed at them, which shows how insane I was going. I barely had optimism anymore, and was also so short-tempered because of the mental and physical tolls -- it wasn’t fair to my friends.

Finals happened last week, and I failed all of them (some intentionally because I knew I had passed the class, some unintentionally) except for analysis which I actually did pretty well on, surprisingly. A few days of slight panic ensued, drowned out by the relief that I could finally sleep enough, and then I got my grades back today, and am actually highly satisfied and relieved. It seems that I was hard carried by my work from before the last few weeks… when I was more sane.

Toward the end, I had a conversation with a current sophomore who took the exact same courses as me in the winter of last year, and he said that he survived by going to office hours often, collaborating with people, and asking for help instead of struggling for long periods of time alone. I had always preferred to work alone for long periods of time, because I thought that I’d understand the material better that way. But he said that the more different people you talk to / collaborate with, the more different approaches you come to know about, and that this can actually teach you more than simply working by yourself would. Plus, working alone came at the cost of social interaction and time spent sleeping. I have learned the hard way that sometimes I can’t have both the joy of figuring out all the problems myself AND mental and physical health, and in the future if I find myself in the oven like this again, I will prioritize the latter.

I’d always tried to be a really independent person who can do things myself, and have prided myself on not needing help. But I think I need to let go of this pride, because here the cost is too high. Basically everyone asks for help, anyway. And I’ve learned through this trimester in particular that I’m not one of the best, so why hide it? I’d probably gain a lot from working together more with the classmates who I’m kinda friends with and who are generally doing well in the class. After homework-filled days, I sometimes went to bed feeling like a robot; like I could grind out homework problems and take in lots of information and lose it after the end of the trimester, in most cases and this did make me feel strong, but also not like a human. Like the humanity in me was missing.

Maybe I can be a soldier and survive on my own in the wild. But I can also be a civilian, and depend on others, and show my weaknesses, and have a much more well-rounded, multifaceted, life.