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I had studied for about fourteen hours yesterday and attempts at sleep brought a pulse of around 120 and symptoms akin to food poisoning. After many fitful hours of sleep I woke up and tried to study more but about two hours out from the exam and 15 flash cards still unmastered I snapped. More knowledge was not going to make its way into my head so I did what any reasonable person would do and added goggly eyes and a wooden mustache to my giant microphone and took a picture of it. This is what insanity looks like.

Madness

I arrived a few minutes early to the exam center and began as soon as I was allowed to. The questions seemed to focus on topics about which I felt competent with the exception of one problem where I repeatedly got an answer that was off from the available answers by a factor 1,000,000. I only wholesale guessed on a single problem and felt hesitant about 2 more. 30 minutes were still on the clock when I hit the “submit” button and quickly a screen popped up indicating a tentative pass mark.

I was happy and nearly skipped back to where my car was parked, until I found out that my car wasn’t there. I called Mike to indicate I’d be late and that my car may have been stolen (or at least that was my dominant fear as my camera bag was in it). Mike said I should check that it hadn’t been towed and a quick call to the Philadelphia Parking Authority revealed that I had stayed in my spot 12 minutes too long and owed them $225. Next time I take Septa.

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I’ve put about two hundred hours into studying over the last forty five days. I’ve been a bit of a hermit and I thank my friends for being understanding. On the math side, I can do certain calculations and leave out steps with the answer still being correct. This would be neater if not for the fact that I sometimes look at my notes and am unsure what steps I left out. I see regions of integration without knowing quite what my logic is but my answers seem to be correct. Yesterday I solved a multiple choice problem by repeatedly mis-solving the question and eliminating those answers leaving the right one. These are the milestones of competency that I should have been looking at before I threw myself into failure the previous two times I took the exam.

Today was my last day of solid studying before my exam and I did 110 sample problems, the equivalent of four exams worth. I consumed 85 pieces of scrap paper and ate only about 1200 calories in food. Fear as a weight loss plan.

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I was a dick today. I didn’t want to be, and I could have avoided it, but I wanted to both attend Anthony Celona’s wedding and get in another four or five hours of studying so I brought a stack of flash cards to a wedding. I went through them before during and after the ceremony and while people at my table were making small talk. I was able to cut the number of cards whose answer I didn’t know reflexively from around 120 to less than 50 so I consider it a productive wedding.

Afterward, Joe and I were talking and he mentioned he had to explain this to someone. “What’s wrong with Terry, he seems agitated and distorted. I just looked at them and said ‘math, that’s what’s wrong’.” Thank you, Joe.

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The last time I took Exam P in 2009 there were sections I simply wrote off as things I didn’t feel bad not knowing. Learning to calculate Jacobian transformations would take many hours and the odds of that being a question seemed low so I simply skipped it after I found it didn’t come to me quickly. This time around, I re-attempted the topics that I had failed at or skipped before and found again them to be inscrutable. Even worse, topics I had been recently doing well on had lost their quick ease.

I did a quick calculation about the number of topics this wall applied to and what portion of the exam they made up figured that I’d need to gain competency in three of the seven to have a good chance of passing my next sitting in a little over a week. I wasn’t going to be able to dodge this one so I talked to my friend Youtube about multivariate transformations and somehow a slightly awkward guy using Sharpies on a presentation board succeeded where two teachers, two exam prep guides, and a lot of wikipedia had failed. Two to go.