Idk Where Life Is Taking Me But Hopefully When I Look Back It Makes Sense.

2nd April 2023

It's 10.46 am right now.. I woke up at around 8.30,had breakfast, and cleaned my room while listening to an audiobook called 'Ethics:a very short introduction'.I have some complex analysis problems to solve.I am feeling lazy.Or maybe I am just afraid of failure and avoiding the task altogether.

It's 8.33 pm now.At around 4 pm I dragged myself out of my bed and started solving complex analysis problems.I did get around 20 problems done (that's my goal 20-25 problems a day and I'm happy).I have an event to attend on Tuesday so I did some online shopping for the same.I will have my dinner now and do some more problems and then go to bed.Btw that's the digital painting that I did yestrtday.It is my third one actually.It is just basic but still wanted to post it 😀.

Signing off

M

I'm kind of relieved today because I finally decided that I'll be studying more of combinatorics and algebraic geometry for my masters thesis and hopefully for my PhD as well.

“I think, if it is true that there are as many minds as there are heads, then there are as many kinds of love as there are hearts.”

- Anna Karenina, Leo Tolstoy

El Capricho Park (Parque El Capricho) , Spain

20/05/2021

Heya, I hope today treated you well 💛

It's almost 10 pm here and I'm getting ready to go to bed.My day didn't really start well.I was panicking for my coming exams lol but it got better after my classes started at 9.The schedule was very hectic today and I was almost out of energy by 3 when the classes finally got over.I had my lunch and practised my French lessons on duolingo.Later in the evening my boyfriend sent me this beautiful video named as Slow life in French countryside and I loved every bit of It😇.Here is the link if anyone wants to watch it.

Later in the evening after having some fruits for snacks I studied the following stuff

Chemistry half a chapter

Group Theory (Quaternions and Matrix Groups)

10 problems on group theory

I also sat and decorated by bujo planner and planned out my next maths course, Linear algebra.

The day started out on a not so high note but it did end well.

Just hoping that everything works out well in the end.I wish the same to you too as well ♡

Hello! If you don't mind can you tell me how you organised your journal for your academics.I am a maths major and I wanted to do that for my proofs as well.I did try searching on the internet but I didn't get anything good.

Thank You in advance xx

It was a really basic format honestly ! So these are all the journals I kept during my whole undergraduate degree.

The black ones were for course and module information, lecture notes, to do lists and essay plans.

The dark and light yellow were a reading journal and a dissertation journal. I wanted to separate my own impressions of texts and I wanted to keep all my dissertation research and planning in one separate place as obviously I was conducting it by myself.

Black Journals

At the start of every year I would write down all the essential information from each of the four modules I was taking. This is an example (I have whited out the name and email of my course convened and lecturer for privacy reasons). But it includes contact information, lecture and seminar hours and locations, learning outcomes and assessment criteria (the things you will be assessed on, obviously paying attention to these helped me get top grades), assessment information (how many essays or exams I had that year and how much they contributed to my final mark and how many words they were) and finally the primary reading list.

This is what a spread of my lecture notes looks like. I always hand wrote my lecture notes because I couldn’t retain information and didn’t enjoy using a laptop. In my first two years I used a rough notebook to write them down then wrote them up neatly later, which was too time consuming for third year. But by that time I had developed my note taking skills and felt confident writing them up as I listened in the lecture. I just wrote the name of the module and the text we were studying and the date for reference. I would change to a red pen for anything I felt was key information. I know most people won’t like this method but I write fast and quite neatly !

My to do lists, essay plans etc didn’t really have a format obviously. I just wrote down what I needed to do, did some rough mind mapping, occasionally put a little doodle in. My essay plans were sort of all over the place but this is where I did my essential planning and then rough work tended to be on scraps of paper or on the draft essay document. The first is a checklist at the end of the year and the second is one of the essay plans/brainstorms for an essay I got a first in.

Yellow Journals

(i.) Reading Journal

I kept a reading journal throughout university, which I wish I had used more. It’s literally just a brain dump of all my thoughts and impressions of what I was reading and any quotes I found relevant. I included secondary reading in this too in my final year. It’s something I’m going to carry on with because I love having somewhere to keep my stream of consciousness about literature. It was so helpful for me to read over this when I was writing my essays because there were some really insightful bits of analysis or key things that I had forgotten and needed reminding of. Highly recommend everyone doing this, if not on paper then on a document on your laptop !

(ii.) Dissertation Journal

There was very little method to this journal. But having it all in one place really kept me organised. It was a place of messy but very important brainstorming, figuring out and rough work. It’s the sort of thing that’s probably only coherent to me. I just wrote down what I needed to do as I went along. So in the early stages there was a lot of trial ideas, there was pages of information about how we should structure and deal with our dissertations from lectures, deadlines etc.

The first image is the first page where I started writing out some vague ideas about the topics I wanted my dissertation to address and which literature that worked with. The last two are just an example of what some of my working out looked like, how I was deciding to structure my argument, and which secondary materials and theorists I would use for each chapter. But there were all sorts of things in there, random tangential points and ideas I needed to note down, tips about how to write an effective dissertation etc. It ended up being my highest grade so this definitely worked for me !

Tried my hand at digital painting.

🌟3rd August 2021 🌟

Summer Studying Challenge by @myhoneststudyblr

Q. What is your least favourite thing about the beach?

Probably getting sand in my hair lol

📷 The picture attached is my bujo spread for the first week of August.

📚Currenly Reading : Men of Mathematics by E T Bell.

I got a proof wrong on an exam. No points. 

Then, I thought about it for fifteen minutes outside of the exam, wrote it down, nailed it. 

I showed a classmate and told him what happened. He looked frustrated. He’d clearly had this happen before, too (haven’t we all?).  He said, “Don’t you hate it when that happens?”

I almost said yes. What the h*ck!? No. No, I do not hate it when I can fathom a deeply abstracted concept in mathematics. I never hate that. I the opposite of hate that. Expecting myself to immediately understand topics like this is unrealistic. I’m proud of being able to do it at all. Who cares if I did it in the exam or within the next hour? I DID IT. It’s mine now. I can do it whenever I want. Missing points on that problem doesn’t take the knowledge out of my brain. How dare I be taught that my knowledge is useless because I didn’t have it right at that moment. It’s just as good now. 

Education is not about the arbitrary numeric number ascribed to your ability to do things quickly in an arbitrary, restricted time interval. Education is about being able to do progressively more things, to understand progressively complex things. 

Tenacity and challenging yourself far beyond your limits is a hundred times more important than getting good grades. Because, when you’re one of .4 percent of the population who possess complete knowledge on a very complex topic, nobody cares how long it took you to do it, or how well you did it the first time you tried. 

Grades don’t discover new mathematics. Mathematicians do (even the ones who failed a basic topic in mathematics because their base way of thinking was too complex). Grades don’t advance medical research. Scientists do (even the ones who had to apply for their PhD programs 3 times in a row before they got accepted). Grades don’t make science fiction into real-world technologies. Engineers do (even the ones who dropped out of school because they wanted to build things, not talk about building things). 

Knowledge is power. Skills are power. Grades are constructs. Never trade actual understanding for a semblance of understanding. 

digital planning is fun ♡ 

Dead Poets Society as Chaotic Academia, pinterest