10 months ago I wrote the following
[….] I decided to not hand in the paper and thus flunk this exam. I feel a bit bad about it and mostly I’m mad at myself that I let it get this far, by starting to work on this paper much too late. But I didn’t want to pass this with an only “sufficient” grade and I wouldn’t have been able to do more than sufficient. […]
I handed in that paper 6 months later and received my grades for it yesterday. 82% which equals a B or a 1,9 (according to the scale you use). So it definitively was the right decision to flunk it at the first try.
And this also helped with the decision I made today: To flunk another exam by not handing another paper in time. It’s due next Sunday and once again I started way too late to work on it. Until this morning I actually really thought I could pull it off. But then I realized, even though I have a basic idea of what to write for the various parts of the paper, there is no way I can actually manage to do that until Sunday. Not with a normal week of work and work-related events on two evenings. I managed to write 1 of the 25 required pages this morning and that took me about 4 hours. At that pace I would need 96 hours to write the rest (and that doesn’t include proof reading) and I just don’t have these 100 hours next week. Ugh!
I once again am a bit mad at myself for letting my studies slide again and now running out of time again, but it would be crazy to try to get this done till Sunday. I’m determined to NOT take another six months to finish this paper though, like I did with the last one in the end. My plan is to have it done (or mostly done) until Easter. Let’s wait and see how that plan works out :-). It will cost me another 100 EUR for repeating the exam, but considering that I could only hand in a crappy paper on Sunday, taking a second shot and having more time to write a decent paper is worth the money.
The relief I already felt after having made that decision is definitely worth the money. The stress of trying to write the paper with all the other stuff going on would probably have either given me another MS attack or an ulcer or a nervous breakdown. None of which is healthy in any regard :-) I spend the rest of today to finally get some chores done around my apartment, go grocery shopping, having a chat with my Mom. And just being much more relaxed than I have been in the past few weeks, during which I had to work on the presentation on 14th February (which I aced by the way. Yes, I had to mention that again *g*) and also started to read textbooks and stuff for this paper. There also was the MS attack which kept my mind preoccupied for a while. So today, after I decided to flunk this exam by not handing in the paper, I felt like I could breath again for the first time in a while. Maybe I should have come to that conclusion some time ago :-)
I will continue to work on it during the next few days, tomorrow even, because I do want to hand it in in a few weeks. There are also a few Green Politics things I have to take care of and which I can do in a relaxed state of mind tomorrow. Tonight though I will spend my time with much nicer things than studying. Preparing something else than ordinary sandwiches for dinner. And watching lots of TV. LOST will still have to wait till tomorrow morning, because I prefer to watch LOST during daytime. Yes, I’m a coward when it comes to possibly scary TV shows. But there is Brothers & Sisters and White Collar (finally!). Maybe I’ll even find the time to check out “How To Make It In America” as well. Or maybe I’ll continue reading the novel I started weeks ago… Oh, all the possibilities.