Not so much apathy as desire to hide from computer once I'm out of work. 10-12 hour days of rapid development iterations leaves me avoiding programming.

Does iteration have the same meaning in the programming world?

Yeah it is.  It's also my weakest subject.  Not that my buildings would fall down, I understand the concepts and I tend to over compenstate on the structural components (columns, beams) by designing them larger than required (only an act of God could level my buildings  ), but as for accurately calculating the exact size of beam I need (as in the barest minimum, which may be more effiecient, but slightly dangerous imho), that's where I usually mess up.  My structural ethic is more along what the ancients did.  Take the pyramids for example.  Just a few tiny rooms and hallways and everything else is just solid rock.  Those buildings aren't going anywhere or suddenly collapse anytime soon.  

Now I say my other weak ARCH subject is Systems (plumbing, electricity, HVAC, etc.), since I barely passed Systems I.  On Systems II I still had no idea what was going on, but I got an A nevertheless.   Still, to be weak in those subjects is not to big of a thing for my profession.  He just have to grasp the basic concepts of them.  We deal mainly in design...and then we hire engineers and contractors that specialize in these subjects to do all practical work while we're in dreamland and getting all the credit.

Hmmm. I'm suddenly very glad I didn't stick with the architecture thing. Granted, I pondered that idea for a short while, and it was more so at my father's insistence. (Man's been trying to convince me to do this or that since I was 12. Not kidding. He's still sad that I'm not going to be a lawyer, in particular, a corporate lawyer -- or that I'm not going to be a doctor or a big business mogul.) Instead I went ahead with Psychology (stop laughing) for my undergrad. He was never pleased with that because psychologists don't make much money. The only real money is in industrial-organisational psychology and in children's psychiatry, and neither interested me. I don't want to be in school until I'm 27 to get an MD or until I'm like 25 to get a PhD. I have other plans. Again, my father isn't particularly fond of them but I have every confidence in myself that I can make it work, and I tend to have low self-esteem, so whenever I have confidence in myself about something, I go for it, because it's usually almost always a certainty. I'm switching out of psychology for grad school. It's a rather large switch, but all in all, regardless of how weird it seems to most people, I don't regret any of my decisions and think that it was actually the best thing I could have done. I don't think I'd have done anything differently were I able to go back and switch anything.

I wouldn't be too terribly concerned. It's been my experience that whenever I have had difficulty grasping something that I tend to understand it later on. Sometimes it will be review of it and it will all suddenly make sense or it will happen when I keep staring at whatever it is or repeated exposure or just completely randomly. You might encounter it again in grad school and then all of a sudden all that stuff just clicks and makes sense. If you're around it enough, and I dare say you probably will be over time, it'll most likely come to you. But, like you said, it's all stuff that you can basically get around one way or another... but, uh, you should probably... uh, learn the stuff.

And on an ENTIRELY unrelated note, hee! I get to go see The Simpsons moobie tonight!

HE LIES!!!!   Nah, maybe its the program...or maybe its the math that's involved with the Structural Physics classes.  Now that stuff is hard.

Structural Physics sounds like a migraine in the making, and based in logic. I don't think I'd like that so very much.

I think I may have figured out the problem.  Generally, when I load the page, I go to http://baldninja.com and then to the forum.  And it always craps out on the first try then (I have to reload, and then it works).  However, if I go to http://www.baldninja.com and then the forum, it works.  I think the lack of the www. is the problem - perhaps you should have the link to the forum automatically put the www.balninja.com in there.

Ahh. I always used to omit the www part of it, too, and I had the same problem. And, yeah, it works if you add it back in. I just got around it by going directly to the forum rather than going to it from the homepage. This actually might explain why I have problems with several websites.

I thought there was a lot of math in architecture because an architecture student told me that there was a lot of math. Maybe their programme was different. Or he was a liar.

That is totally win.

You have no idea.

Well, one good thing about the GRE is you can always retake them if you need to - and since it's a "smart test" you just have to schedule it, it's not at certain times (like the SAT is).  Plus, I think the GRE is sort of like the SAT - it's important, but it's not heavily weighted.

It is a comforting notion, save for the fact that I am but a poor lout. Poor in the money sense, that is.

Well, you have another month, right?  I actually took an incomplete on the class I did my master's project in, and of course, waited until the last possible moment to finish my project.  I think it's a normal thing for people to do.

Yes, about another month. I'm hoping to have it finished by this week. It's actually a paper on Buffy the Vampire Slayer. I've finished all the work for the paper, now it just needs yet to be written.

Well, a lot of has to do that its one of the hardest majors.  Not to say that becoming a lawyer or doctor is any easier per se, but at least in Law and Medicine all the answers are basically in a book.  Architecture on the other hand is mostly a subjective major.  One teacher may give you an A on a project declaring it the best in the class, while another will give you a C if you are lucky and declare that you set back the design profession at least ten years.  Last Fall I had a professor give me a C on a project that I did all that was required, worked over 48 hrs straight on the model without sleeping, and did a hell of a lot more than some of the other groups (a lot of them didn't even finish).  When we presented the projects I ended up getting lower grades than some of the students with the unfinished projects.  (to get to know how odd this guy was, he purposely wore his belt buckle off to the side to purposly "throw off symmetry.")  It was a 6 hr class to boot, so it really hurt my GRA at a time I needed it to be high to get into grad school.   Still, I put that project into my grad. school portfolio (you never put the grades you made in the portfolio for obvious reasons), and that project got me two letters of reccommendation from other professors that saw it.  I've been heralded as a good student by some profs, and others have humiliated me in front of class saying stuff like, "You don't know the first thing about design" or "You're not devoted enough to the arch of architecture" (this coming from a prof. after three solid nights of working on a single project with circles around my darks that wear so dark, you might I thought I had on thick rimmed glasses).  And then of course there's the architecture student's that constantly got As on their work.  Usually their "designs" had nothing to do with architecture.  Like this one guy didn't get a haircut or shave the entire year, then set up a publicity stunt in the atrium where he was shaved in public and did yoga afterwards.  This was declared by many of the faculty as a "Great Work of Art" and he was given an A in his studio for doing nothing while the rest of us toiled endlessly on projects that had something to do with making buildings.  ARG!

But...that's water under the bridge now since I got into grad school.  As for your GRE, since you're college says the scores don't really matter so much for admission, I'd say that your target should be anything over 1200.  Oh, and aren't the prices of those courses highway robbery?   As useful as they are, I can't believe they get away with charging us $1000 fees on them.  Oh, and another thing about the GRE, it's a "smart" test.  You take it on the computer.  The first five to ten questions each section gauge your abilities.  So after you answer the first few questions and then suddenly they start getting really hard and complex, take it as a good sign that you're doing well.  If the questions start getting really easy, then you're probably doing pretty bad because the test adapted to you getting wrong answers and thus gave you easy ones because it pitied you.

If you've got any more questions on the GRE and the like, I'll be happy to answer.

Yeah, the class is $1149. It is highway robbery, but the last time I took a standardised test, I didn't take any classes or look through any books (I did decently, considering, but still -- could've done better) because my grades were good, my extracurriculars were exceptional, my recommendations were embarrassingly flattering and my essay was very good. I had enough proof to show that I work my butt off and excel beyond what most individuals do. I just freak out when I take standardised tests. I wanted to be admitted based upon what I normally do, not upon what I could study for and learn to beat the system. I've always been insanely ambitious & perfectionistic, so I was proud of myself for not pushing myself on that one. I was put on the waiting list of one school that by all reasoning I should have gotten accepted into (I know three people who got accepted there who... uh... lacked my GPA, extracurriculars, ambition and effort, though their SAT scores were similar), and that kind of sucked, but whatever. That school is in the bad area of a big city and would have been more dangerous. So, instead, I opted to go to Boston. But I'm in a good part of the city. Granted, a few months ago I was assaulted and had my ribs broken, but I still attest that it's a safe area. (I should be their spokesperson!) I got turned down from 2 other schools I applied to, but I knew there was a distinct possibility of that because they were lofty goals. Got accepted to a decent state school, but I knew I would be. I also got accepted to an extremely good school in Ohio and was even given a partial scholarship and invited into their honours programme. Buuut, it was a state school and therefore felt that I was well-equipped to pay the remaining $30,000 each year. (Ha ha ha) All in all, I got into the school that I had actually wanted to go to, so it all worked out. It's just that this time around, I've gotten hypocritical and decided that I'm ok with studying for this testing thing, because I only have one shot at this.

And, ew. I had considered architecture eons ago, but the whole math thing kinda turned me off from it. The only kind of math I like is Statistics, and even then, I only like doing it by hand. And, hey! I've gone a year without getting a haircut. Well, I recently just chopped it all off and now it's fairly short. But to think, all this time I could have done a publicity stunt for it and received praise. The crazy Bostonians would have been all over that, too. Darn. Where do you go to school? Because, uh, that made it sound almost like you went to Oberlin -- er, well, a non-sexual Oberlin.

This probably won't help a bit, but the GRE is not that bad - I went and took it without even knowing what the questions were really like (I think I glanced at them online), and didn't even study... I did pretty good, not *great* but pretty good... good enough, at least.  If I recall, when you sign up for the GRE they send you a CD with practice stuff on there and online tests you can take.  I think if you would have had time to learn this stuff in a class, you could probably learn the stuff from a book/online classes.  I know that I personally learn stuff better from teachers, but this isn't stuff you don't know already - you just have to learn how to take the test (it's just like the SAT, except on a computer - at least my version was).  Besides, I've heard the classes are a big ripoff anyways.

 Good luck Lindsay!

It all just came at a really inopportune time. I've been having an incredibly rough go of it the past week or so -- well, before that, but that's when things started getting really bad. A lot of bad things have been happening and it's all just been terribly crippling for me. It just really sucks, because there's only one programme I want to get into. I mean, there are approximately 5 programmes in the English-speaking world, but 2 of them are certificate programmes, and if I'm going to pay money I'm darn well going to get a degree for it. And then 2 of the remainder of the programmes are out of the country -- one in Toronto, the other one in Leeds (England). Plus, my programme is faster, which essentially means less money in the long run. It just puts more pressure on me because it's not like there's another place I can really go or another programme that I've fallen in love with. I just have one chance, more or less. And it's a good school. Blaaah.

And, as sad as this may sound, I was hoping on finishing my paper from last semester that I took an incomplete on and uh, I have... 5 more books that I had hoped to get through before I go back. And they're not short. They're also borrowed. Or, rather, one is borrowed and the others were forced upon me.

So, approximately 2 hours after I posted that my father was going to pay for my GRE course, I get a call on my cell phone while I'm out. It was my dad. He calls to inform me that his car insurance bill just came and it's due next month, as well as the property tax (it increased by like 328% -- not a typo), and that he's not going to be able to come up with the money to pay for my GRE class. This is a problem. This is a big, big problem. I'm upset. I'm sad. I'm mad. I'm... I'm smad. I'm completely beyond furious. Had I known this 2 months ago we could have bought materials for me to study and I could have made a study schedule for myself. As it stands, I'm screwed. I don't have the money -- I barely have enough to cover actually taking the GRE and applying to grad school. Everyone's telling me it's not a big deal, but it is. They all tell me how they all took it and got into grad school and that it was fine and how I have all the time in the world. I do not. Their programmes work differently and no one I know has ever had to have their thesis proposal ready WITH their application and do all that crap on their own without any classes under their belt and decide what they want to study before they do it. And everyone I know who's had to do that has spent a considerable amount of time debating and deciding what they want to study. So, I somehow doubt that most people quite understand the stress I'm undergoing. I have to go through the archives and see what's available and see if I can get any sort of ideas from that. I'm expecting hours upon hours going through the stuff just to come up with an idea. Plus, I'm taking a graduate course in the fall and I have several other obligations during the week and having to study on my own and not having a nice little schedule with tips to help me out (because I freak out when taking tests that have everything riding on them) is really going to screw me over. I can't handle all of that at once and expect to do decently on the GRE. I have hit meltdown point twice already today, and I just don't know what to do. I'm freaking out and I need help, and I can't contact the only person who can really calm me down and level me back down. Oh, and did I mention that I'm screwed?

Blah grr blah grr blah blah blah.

I'm getting my Masters in Architecture.  Don't worry about the GRE, if you did good on your SATs in high school, the GRE is basically the same thing, but be sure to study or take a refresher course.  The course helped me a lot.

Oh, neat! It seems like not many people go into architecture anymore. Nowadays everyone wants to be a doctor, a lawyer or a teacher. Or at least in my experiences those are three most popular professions. About half of everyone I meet wants to go into one of those areas. It's craziness.

I'm going to be taking a GRE course starting like the week after I get to school. My dad isn't too terribly happy about paying the $1149, but I don't care. He's the one that's been pushing me towards grad school for the past SIX YEARS. At first I refused because, but have since changed my mind. Since he's getting his way here, and since he's not paying for my schooling, I don't think it's too much to ask for him to pay for the GRE course. I've talked to the co-director of the programme I want to enter (guy's from Scotland; got his PhD at Oxford and is very much enthusiastic about what he does) and he said that the GRE isn't that big of a factor in admissions, as long as I do decently on it (elatedness!). However, I'm paranoid, and this is THE programme that I want to do, so I don't want to make any screw-ups, so that's why I'm going to take the course. Plus, the GRE was supposed to change this month, but I read recently that they've decided to not change it. I don't know what's going on with that. Grades are important (mine are much more than fine), but from what I gathered, the real emphasis is on the proposal that we submit with our application. It's not run the same way most MA & PhD programmes are; you have to know specifically what you want to study when you apply. You submit a MA or a PhD proposal in with your application to the programme, which more or less means I shall be spending hours in the archives when I get back to school trying to figure out what I want to do.

Thanks.  When I came back last year I was suddenly struck down by one architecture project after another (man, I was a wreck by May).  So, now I finally have my bachelor's degree and await grad school.

Neat! What are you going to go to grad school for?
I'm getting my undergrad in May (I'm graduating a year early), and then, God willing, I'll be going to grad school next fall. I'll either be getting an MA or a PhD, depending upon what I want to do for my thesis (I have to decide before I apply. So, basically, this fall. Eeeek.). I'll probably end up doing the MA, though, because I have this slight problem with overachieving and perfectionism and so I naturally lean towards the PhD, which is only a year longer than the MA, and I kind of need to work on getting away from that problem. The only real motivation for me to go for the PhD is so that I can be Dr. Lindsay, which once I actually think about it seems like an awful reason to do a PhD. And what's more, the only benefit it would give me is the ability to be a professor which wasn't in the game plan to begin with and professors are often required to do academic research, and I don't want to do that, especially not if they tell me I HAVE to. But, whatever. I need to worry about taking the GRE in the fall and coming up with a thesis/dissertation proposal (I come up with ideas, then Google them only to find out they've already been done!) and, you know, actually getting into grad school first.

Thank you kind lady.  Hopefully I'll stick around a little longer than my last visit about a year ago.

Hopefully! We'll just have to start being a more talkative bunch, I guess. Then maybe you'll have motivation to stick around.

I LIVE!!!!

Welcome back, sir.

But it does get terrifying when you realize you're cracking jokes that question your own existence...

Generally speaking, those tend to be the best kind of jokes.