Above The Water

These days I'm really struggling to keep my head above the water. Or maybe my nose, because my neck is at times very much submerged.

I was raised by parents who placed a big importance on education. They were not the "tiger parents" who constantly pushed for better than my absolute best, but they did keep a close watch every report card and questioned me for anything lower than a 90. When High School came along, they melted into the background and pretty much let me handle my school work because I expected a lot better from myself than they did.
In HS, every point made a difference. All that mattered to me was how high my GPA could get, because graduating in the top 5% of my class was the driving force and ultimate motivation.
[There are unresolved psychological issues at play here, all I cared about was "walking the line" first during graduation and avoiding the alphabetical order issue which had plagued me my entire life because my last name started with the letter Z. Anyway, it did the trick. I was #16 in a class of 500.]

So I just wanted to mention and let it be clear that I am of slightly above-average intelligence, and that the "ok" grades have and always will be A's.
Given this information, please digest the following:
At this point in my educational career, I would be happy with C's. 
Learning is pretty tough at the moment. I am struggling to keep my head above the water. I have a persistent, internal, disapproving frown directed at myself because I can't seem to do better, and combined with other "life" factors [aka P being gone all the time] I have caught myself thinking pretty depressive thoughts.
One random day not very long ago, during one of my "sad because life+school=sucks" moments, I received a phone call from my dad.
[Priesthood power and revelation is a seriously wonderful thing]
We talked for a maximum of 3 minutes, but he sure knew what to say. He doesn't know that I am having my "moments", all I said was "school? well... school is a lot harder than I thought it would be". His response? "Keep your spirits up. Not anyone achieves this."  (Animo hija, esto no cualquiera lo logra)

Thanks, dad. I have been repeating those words on a daily basis, and they truly are helping.
I am nowhere near close to a Master's degree yet... but I know that day will come with enough persistence and determination. And it's true, not everyone achieves it.

I just wanted to say...

I have always sucked at all flavors of math, ever since middle school when they decided to add the alphabet into the numbers. Ugh.

But I have to say... Trigonometry might be my niche. 

Things might have gone easier had I just GONE TO CLASS and paid attention like everyone else, but considering I figured this out by myself... it didn't go so bad.

3.5 hours, 1 blog post, 1 bowl of cereal, and 3 Pandora stations later... I finished my homework! Yay me! 

Actually, I Can

Why hello there, sad and lonely blog! Sorry I've neglected you for so long, let me dust the cobwebs off you. 

that's a programming joke... in case you don't get it

A couple of hours ago I took my final exam for my C++ class. Wheew, what a load that's taken off my mind! I'm glad its over, and I'm also glad it happened. Summer classes can be a little daunting sometimes because there is so much material to cover in such a short span of time, and this one was no exception. Actually... it kind of sort of was a little different; this class was 8 weeks long instead of the usual 4, so we had more time to cover the material, but it still felt like a race against time. It was a HUGE learning curve... my Post-Bacc Certificate is in GIS, and that C++ has really nothing to do with it, but it was required anyway. The great majority of the class were computer science majors that already knew the language, but it was completely new to me.
Most of the time I always felt like the slowest student in there (I wasn't). We had 15 scheduled lectures, 12 labs, and 3 exams. I love writing notes, and I'm an extremely visual learner, which means I learn material best by writing it in my own handwriting and then seeing it in my mind's eye later. I managed to fill up a 3-subject notebook in 8 short weeks, all color-coded and with exam reviews included. That took a lot of my time.
I also managed to stumble my way through the labs and I surprised myself at the end of each one. It's something that I've given a lot of thought to over the last couple of weeks...

You see, the material covered in the lecture was all well-defined and theoretical... but it was the kind of stuff you don't understand until you actually apply it. At the start of each of those 10 labs, soon after reading the assignment, I thought about giving up. Everything seemed so impossible! There was absolutely NO WAY I could figure this program out and complete it in the next 24 hours!
Soon after every moment of panic, I would painstakingly open Notepad ++ and start with the only thing I knew how to do... the bare basics. Name, lab name, class number, date...
Then I would move on to writing out the Purpose of the program... what it was meant to do. That cleared things up A LOT. Sentence by sentence, it all started making sense. Now I knew what to do, just not quite how to do it, although the end result seemed clear.

So I took it one line at a time. I typed out what I knew was right... I asked the professor A LOT of questions about what I was unsure of, I read and re-read the directions, I tested and changed the program more times than I care to remember... and I still came up short. Each one of those labs had a tiny section of it that nobody could do without our teacher's help. The kind of help where she literally did it all for us and told us step-by-step which keys on the keyboard to press so it comes out right. I could not have done it without her.
Some programs were easy... some were hard. The easiest one I wrote was only 150 lines of code, took me about 45 minutes, and just all made sense. I later came to find out it was the shortest anyone wrote... some people's were over 2,000 lines long!
The hardest one was the time I sat in that chair for 6 hours. Everyone else (teacher included) had already finished and left, and I was left alone to fix my own mistake and I worked sooo hard to get my program to compile and run... only to get an 86 on it for all that work. (I never got anything below a 93 besides this one).
So lesson learned... I was surprisingly good at some things, and I was surprisingly mediocre at others. Still, it all balanced out to give me the grade I wanted and felt I deserved in the end :)

Back To School Time

Yesterday I was finally registered for classes at TAMUCC! My goal is to obtain a GIS Post-Bacc Certificate (GIS = Geographic Information Science) and then do everything in my power to obtain a Masters in Geospatial Surveying Engineering. I might have to get a second full-blown bachelors in GIS before I can move on to that step, but I don't believe it will stop me. GIS is one of the best majors offered at TAMUCC and they're online program is very good, so even if other things come up in life between now and then, I can still do it.

I am sooo excited! The semester right after I graduated I felt a huge relief about no more exams and endless papers to write and scientific journals to read, but soon after I discovered I really missed the classroom. I think being a student is just my element; nothing feels more natural than sitting in a classroom frantically taking notes. 

Weird, huh? 

The truth is, even though I just called myself weird, I consider it a personal blessing to have been born and raised with such a love for learning. Not many people enjoy this as much as I, and so I think of it as a talent that shouldn't go to waste. The first line in my patriarchal blessing mentions how important my education is and always will be, so I'm doing myself justice and accepting the blessing that I was rightfully meant to have. 

So here are the classes I'm taking: 

This Summer is going to be pretty yucky. These are both two-month long courses, and I had to sign a paper which literally said "I understand I will have no life due to my classes" before being allowed to register.
Calculus II
Problem Solving w/ Computers 

And then Fall is going to be insanely busy! I will be working full-time and running back and forth to classes during lunch breaks. (15 hours, and labs are the looong computery kind of labs)
Geospatial Mathematical Techniques
Geospatial Software Systems I
Remote Sensing
Geospatial Plane Measurement I

So even though this looks and feels insane, I know I can do it. Past college years have shown that I am more motivated during difficult semesters because I know I can't slack off. I can do this, I can do this!