{"id":463,"date":"2004-05-21T16:23:23","date_gmt":"2004-05-21T21:23:23","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/flaminggeeks.com\/k\/blog\/2004\/05\/21\/\/"},"modified":"2005-10-19T19:56:47","modified_gmt":"2005-10-19T23:56:47","slug":"tempting-fate","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/flaminggeeks.com\/k\/blog\/2004\/05\/21\/tempting-fate\/","title":{"rendered":"Tempting Fate"},"content":{"rendered":"
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I have this phobia about talking about things that are in progress or still undecided. So generally, if I have a long gap in posting, it means there’s something going on which I’m waiting for a resolution for before actually writing about it — something important enough that it seems like writing without<\/i> mentioning it is silly.<\/p>\n

Or else I’m just being lazy. It’s often hard to tell.<\/p>\n

In this case, however, the gap between posts was because of the former reason. For the past two years I’ve been going to graduate school full time to finally finish my Masters degree. It was something I really wanted to do; something I told myself I would<\/i> do, especially after I quit graduate school the first time, in the spring of 1999.<\/p>\n

It came down to this semester and the required project credit. It was this that was the stumbling block last time — after a year in school, I still had no idea what to do for a project and felt disconnected from the professors, so I left. I knew that if I quit again, I probably wouldn’t ever manage to go back. But even though I nominally had a project worked out back at the start of the semester, I had an extremely difficult time motivating myself to actually work on it. I spent most of the semester fretting over it and staring listlessly at my computer screen getting nothing accomplished.<\/p>\n

I never could really see<\/i> myself done with the degree. I never had this mental block as an undergrad; I never felt any doubt that I would finish, and finish easily. So May rolled around (the last day of finals was May 14th) and the project was still virtually unstarted. If I was actually going to graduate this semester, this was a problem.<\/p>\n

Somehow (with some help from Bob and J) the project was completed. I put together a presentation which I showed to my adviser on the 14th, at nearly the last minute. I sent her a paper (19 real pages, 59 with the code) so she could turn in the grade on the 17th, as was required for anyone graduating this semester. And then I got to worry about what the grade was. It had to be a B- or more to count so I could fulfill all the requirements for graduation.<\/p>\n

The grades were finally online this morning, and I got an A. I’M DONE!!!<\/p>\n

It’s such a relief to have that over with and confirmed over with. I’ve been in a state of paralysis waiting for the response; it felt weird to update my resume to include the degree, tempting fate to claim it before it was official that I was going to get it.<\/p>\n

Now I need a job.<\/p>\n

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I have this phobia about talking about things that are in progress or still undecided. So generally, if I have a long gap in posting, it means there’s something going on which I’m waiting for a resolution for before actually writing about it — something important enough that it seems like writing without mentioning it […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":[],"categories":[1],"tags":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/flaminggeeks.com\/k\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/463"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/flaminggeeks.com\/k\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/flaminggeeks.com\/k\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/flaminggeeks.com\/k\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/flaminggeeks.com\/k\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=463"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/flaminggeeks.com\/k\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/463\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/flaminggeeks.com\/k\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=463"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/flaminggeeks.com\/k\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=463"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/flaminggeeks.com\/k\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=463"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}