go hard then go home
As I have pushed through the semesters, my academic motivation has inflected a number of times. The last 2 semesters were a rough road of dissatisfaction with my effort - even though I found the topics interesting, there wasn’t a significant amount of inner drive propelling me from lecture to assignment to project and back again. It was hard to rev my academic engine with the fuel of creative endeavor and engineering discovery.
From this first week of this semester’s work, I have focused on recovering that energy. In the near future, I will be on an entirely different academic spectrum that requires an uncommon focus and determination. I can’t get there on easy street. I’d inevitably crash and burn on the altar of graduate education.
This morning was set aside for some acoustics derivations, originally performed in the 1950s, but due for my class - just 7 students - this coming Monday afternoon. After an hour of painful coffee-bingeing in hopes of mathematical epiphanies, a point was reached when my understanding of the math materialized and rapidly multiplied. Then, the lightbulb moment.
As an engineering student, you aren’t taught to have lightbulb moments. You’re taught to develop an uncanny pattern recognition, finely tuned for ideal problems but poorly focused for the real world, and even less adept at innovation. My very first talk to my professor about graduate work was met with his encouraging devil’s advocacy, warning me that graduate students were nothing like undergraduates. They possessed a spirit not openly marketed but manifest when the round peg doesn’t immediately fall into the square hole. My professor inspired me to start reading a variety of scientific literature and pursuing anything academic not simply to buffer my future schooling prowess but also for a well-rounded perspective with which to view problems.
Having followed his advice for a time, I then slumped into a terrible academic depression when non-engineering topics interested me the most, save for those periods when my acoustics research absorbed me. Perhaps today’s lightbulb moment is a sign of things to come. If anything, the adrenaline resulting from such an epiphany is enough to cruise with until my next breakthrough. I expect small steps, but the big leaps are helpful after a long depression.
After writing all of this, I don’t feel like doing much more work tonight, if any. It has already been a long day. Plus, it’s rather cold outside. This is a prime time for sweats, a novel, and a comfortable chair. We work hard but we play hard.