Getting it off my chest

It's smack in the middle of exams, and I have a programming final that I'm not prepared for tomorrow, but I just have to blog now. I am pissed with McGill Admin. Very very pissed. Allow me to explain.

I had my first final today, it was for Calculus, and it was held in the McConnell Engineering Building. The way it works is that you're told what building your final is held, and you go there on the day itself to find out where exactly the room your exam is. Rooms are allocated by surname, because some rooms are not big enough to fit all the students. So I go to school half an hour early to find out that the administration has brilliantly only allocated rooms for people with surnames up to the letters "Lud". So those of us whose surnames come after those letters all go to the biggest venue, and ask the invigilator there where we are supposed to go. And she has no clue.

Nevermind that, she asks us to wait, and she'll let us in, IF she has space. So there's half the course waiting outside your exam room, 15 minutes before the exam, and you've been told that we have ABSOLUTELY NOWHERE to go to take the exam, and all you do is ask us to wait.

Why can't you do the proactive thing and help us find out where we're supposed to go? You are an invigilator after all. And to add to that, you have this brilliant idea of asking the students, who are waiting to take the exam, to go to FDA 6, and speak to the people there to find out where we are supposed to go. You tell us this at 1:55pm, after we have been standing there for 10 minutes. Couldn't you have told us earlier? To add to that, there are 2-3 invigilators in your room, doing absolutely nothing, seeing how the exams have already been placed on the tables, and you can't even show us where this fucking room is? Don't you think, that as the people sitting for an exam, the least you could do for us is to speak to whoever organised the damn thing? No, instead we have to fix something that the admin messed up on, 5 minutes before our exam.

Maybe I'm being hard on the invigilators, but, they weren't doing anything, the exam hadn't started, and there were 3 of them in the room. Surely, at least one could have gone to FDA 6 to report the situation. Or at least show one of us where the bloody room was. And, we came 15 minutes before to let you know, and you had to wait till 5 minutes before the damn thing to tell us to go to FDA 6.

Going further up chain, I fail to see how the admin failed to realise that yes, people's surnames DO begin with letters after L. Let's do our ABC's shall we? M,N,O,P,Q,R,S,T,U,V,W,X,Y,Z. That's 14 letters, MORE THAN HALF the alphabet. How could you not notice? And if you did have the list of students and the course enrollment, wouldn't you have realised that there was a shortfall in the number of spaces allocated?

I had to keep all that in me for 3 hours as I took my exam, so it feels good to get it all out.

Alright, back to studying now.

Exams

I am royally screwed. Exams end in two weeks (no, not begin. Exams begin a week from now), and I haven't even started studying yet. And I still have assignments due. Shit. Am also feeling almost burnt out, because since reading week (3rd week of Feb), I have not had a single weekend where I could completely unwind. My profs like to have assignment deadlines on Fridays, Sundays and Mondays, and they like to release new assignments the moment old ones are due i.e programming - assignment due Monday at 11:55pm, new assignment up Tuesday 0:00am. Yay! My thoughtful profs gave me a whole 5 minutes of rest.

Since the fourth week of Feb, I've had to write 2 papers, complete 6 physics assignments and 3 lab reports, 3 programming assignments, 3 calculus assignments, take 2 midterms, write 1 in-class essay, give an oral presentation and come up with a business proposal. On top of reading for political science, which of course I did not do because I had no time. All this on top of going to class. In 6 weeks. I didn't even realise it was that much until I wrote it all down just now.

What the hell is wrong with McGill Admin anyway? Why can't we have just 1 week between the end of classes and the start of exams? Who in their right minds has classes up till the day before exams start? No time to think about all that right now. Time to haul ass, get my assignments done, and start studying, before I collapse from exhaustion on the 20th, only to send myself back to the grind on May 1.

And I remember being told JC would be the toughest time of my academic life. No way in hell does it compare to this.