Little Fish

I had a really bad case of "little fish in a big pond" today.

I could feel it coming on yesterday in my "Information and Inference" class when I spent 5 hours in the library teaching myself about sums of discrete random variables and convolution for the part a of subproblem i of problem 1.1 of the homework.

I'm not joking. It was a huge assignment, and the first two problems (1.1i has 6 parts, and 1.1ii also has 6 parts... I didn't even look at problem 1.2..) were supposed to be review. While everyone else got out their pencils and started scribbling figures and humming happily in class, I stared at the problem, and felt like a small fish.

And then this morning I got up after a minor arctic "event" that had covered the ground with snow and stopped all but the most necessary pedestrian traffic, and walked to my lab at Harvard where I needed to go to a lab meeting. After the meeting, I talked with my advisor, and headed to class at MIT.. And it was somehow raining, although the temperature was below freezing. I'm not sure how that works, but it was doing it. So the ice was slick, and it was covered by a pool of water.

The sidewalks were pretty well plowed, as were the streets, but the curbs and the transitions from curb to sidewalk were large puddles of water/slush..

As I stepped into one of these puddles, after my foot sunk in about 6 inches, I realized that the puddle was deeper than I had anticipated, and found myself unable to retract my foot from the watery monster that was eagerly slurping my foot up like a raw oyster.

Even my brand new waterproof boots couldn't keep out all of the water, and once again, I found myself feeling like a small fish in a large pond.

Of freezing water.

The same feeling happened today as I went to my randomized algorithms class, in which we were informed that the professor hears that his class is extraordinarily hard for entering graduate students, and recommended not wasting our time with it...

I guess this is a big change from undergraduate where I felt like I could basically take any class and do well in it. So upon selecting classes here at MIT, I chose classes that sounded interesting, reasoning that I had taken similar classes at BYU so I didn't need to satisfy the pre-reqs.

So, now I am trying to schedule an appointment with my advisor, so I can crawl back with my tail between my legs, and change all my classes to the simple entry-level classes...

I'm still looking for cures to Little-Fish Syndrome, and I hope it isn't contagious.

But I've heard that a warm climate can alleviate some of the symptoms...