Updating regularly from now on - I promise!

Hello, readers! In a nutshell - I've been busy doing stuff such as not updating this blog. Now, for the post:
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EXAMS, again...

Ah, exams – an inevitable and recurring part of life – are welcomed with fear and excitement by nervous students. After stressing about studying hard, for me at least, I lose nearly all my motivation to study a few days prior to the day of judgement. I do not know why this happens – I’ve never thought about it. Before my NTSE, I decided to try playing all possible game modes and configurations in Age of Empires II. During my SSC boards, I developed an intense interest in learning Urdu online, which I did to a level that serves my purpose. My HSC boards saw me taking notes of undergraduate chemistry courses in organic synthesis. During my first year at college, I started watching ERASED – a murder mystery. Today as I write this, a couple of days before my GRE, having ascertained this trend, I have taken a break from studying to write about my thoughts on this. Also, I’m tired from all the cycling I did this afternoon out in the first rains of the season.

Standard examinations such as the GRE at the international level, the JEE at the national level and the boards exams at the state or regional level have one thing in common – a relatively fixed pattern of questions and the source of these questions. College exams are different in the sense that – again, for me – paying attention in class and a quick revision usually suffices. That is, unless you cannot match the professor’s wavelength and have no idea what’s been taught, in which case an all-nighter does the trick. Nevertheless, the repetitiveness of the protocols to be followed in exams and the persistent pressure to test your mettle in mock tests gets boring. And you need a break.

One theory is that, assuming the preparation strategies have worked out and there’s no need to burn any metaphorical oil, your studies are pretty much done around a week before the exams. Revising, then, adds nothing to your pool of information and knowledge, and trying to re-read stuff just makes me sleepy. As sleeping feels like wasting time, opting for active rest – indulging in some other activity – sounds like a better option. All the minor points on the invisible bucket list of the mind rush into picture. In this way, I have accomplished many things: understanding Western classical music; reading musical notation; speaking a rudimentary level of French, Korean, Spanish, Russian, and a more than rudimentary level of Japanese; a certification in linguistics; knowledge about pure chemistry stuff that I won’t go into right now and so on… It just has to be something that is involved enough to take my mind off the exams and keep me interested.

Based on this, I draw two conclusions. First, you need some idea of what you want to do other than what you’re supposed to do (i.e. your job). Second, I like to brag about what I’ve done. Continuing the trend, the only course of action ahead of me is to plan my studies in such a way that I am seen squandering my precious pre-exam time on unrelated matter and then (hopefully) topping the exams ‘effortlessly’.

(Also, this random write-up is a part of my GRE preparation. Though this doesn’t adhere to the pattern of the exam in any direct way, it helps me practice coherence in writing grammatically correct sentences and logically structured prose.)

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Planning to update weekly/bi-weekly. Let's see how it goes. I have some small pieces - including some dark poetry - ready, and have realized that writing is an effective stress release. I like writing but can't be absolutely certain whether life will keep on stressing me enough (and in the proper way) to write. I'll try, of course, on my side to keep things running.