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After a busy couple of weeks and a down-to-the-wire finish, I feel like I can relax a little. My parents rejoice at the sound! I'll tell you about the hair-raising finish: I spent most of my interclass time yesterday printing, copying and stapling together five copies of my UROP (SURF) summer research proposal to be handed in by 4pm. I made it over the the Hamel Center by 2 with a beautiful and convincing proposal only to find out that the man in the UROP office hadn't yet received Marc Lessard's recommendation! I called Marc on the way back from making a few extra copies that I originally forgot and had to leave a message imploring him to throw something together and send it off ASAP. Fortunately, I can tell you with the serenity of hindsight that he sent the email yesterday evening and the UROP man confirmed receipt this morning. All set.

Now that the proposal and my AGU Spring meeting abstract have been submitted, the pressure is off (for now) in terms of lab work (I still have to actually get the research underway) and can be shifted to class work. Specifically, I can start paying more attention to thermo, which has suffered over the past few weeks of increased lab and Friday's work. I did very poorly on a test two Tuesdays ago and I know it was because I worked all weekend and Monday night, leaving me a teensy bit of time to study while getting calc and physics homework done. (As an aside, I have since changed my schedule, removing Monday nights in favor of adding Wednesday nights since we have a thermo test or quiz every Tuesday.) But even allowing for a "bad test day", I feel like I'm only barely getting by in that class in terms of internalizing and owning the information. I can come up with homework answers just fine but I want to feel more like I know what is going on the way I do in calc and physics (recent test scores there were 91 and 99 respectively so it is clear that thermo should be my focus). One thought that I had the other day is that for many other classes, I have spent a lot of time before the sememster preparing - consider that I spent that year while at Dover High teaching myself calculus and that I spent last year taking intro physics and math courses - but that has not been the case for thermo. I was inclined, at one point, to wonder why I am picking the thermo material up more slowly that I picked up other material but I may not be doing that at all. Either way, I spent a few solid hours this morning taking careful notes of the chapter we're finishing and you can be that I will spend a lot of time with that book from now until our test next Tuesday.