Part 1: Introductions | Part 2: Trust me, I'm an engineer | Part 3: The city of cycles | Part 4: "Aiden's still working!" | Part 5: A soberman's night out | Part 6: Time for another entry | Part 7: MOCer Diaries | Part 8: Read all about it
As usual, I am writing this Cantablogger entry from the comforts of my room on the ground floor. My window looks out onto the path outside; while there are wooden panels that I could use to cover it, I prefer to keep it open most of the time. Of course, this means that anybody walking past can and will peer in to see what I’m doing, and I’m almost always sitting at my computer. The phrase “Aiden’s still working!” has become commonplace, and is now a running joke among my friends. Work also happens to be the delightful topic of this blog entry! Let us begin.
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I’ve talked about my work ethic before, in a previous journal. While I do think that I didn’t quite get my point across in that entry, I am happy with how I closed it:
“I shall be off to university next year, where everybody around me will likely share the same attitude towards diligence. Everyone will be intelligent, so in our minds, no-one will be; as daunting as it sounds, I look forward to it.”
And in many ways, that has turned out to be true. There’s no doubt that everybody here is smart; that’s a prerequisite for getting in. And hey, I love that aspect. I love being able to have casual but in-depth discussions with people who think the same way that I do. In terms of people’s attitudes towards work in general, I’ve found that there’s quite a wide range – as expected, some people remain constantly ahead of work, though alarmingly many make a habit of leaving questions until the hour before the relevant supervision. I try to associate myself with the former.
As for intelligence, it’s only natural to compare oneself to one’s peers, though I try not to. This first came to light after our mock exam in January: while the people here are humble for the most part, I was disappointed that the ‘Oh my God, I got a higher mark than Aiden!’ notion lingers on from high school. I maintain that comparing yourself in that sense is detrimental, as it induces an element of competition that (in this context) is irrelevant to your academic capabilities; I prefer looking instead at the predictions of the outcome of my degree. That way, I know where I stand in terms of my own performance, and the results of my peers do not concern me. Obviously I could talk about where I stand in the supposed hierarchy of the Jesus engineers, but what would that achieve? I’m working at a level that suits me, and that’s what matters.
At the risk of sounding elitist (which is incredibly easy, I’ve found), I’m fairly certain that most people here were at the top of their class at high school, breezing through the system on a carpet of A* grades without too much trouble. Thankfully there are no absolute prodigies among the 14 first-year engineers at Jesus College, nor are there any obvious stragglers of the group, but nevertheless I’m pretty sure everybody has silently reassessed their own intelligence. I’m not the only one who’s thought, “I’m really not as smart as I thought I was.”
I mean, I’ve always been a perfectionist. I like things being complete, exact, flawless. It took me a while to accept that being a perfectionist simply isn’t possible anymore; there are unavoidably going to be questions that I can’t answer, and it’s maddening. There are times when I struggle, and I’m just not used to struggling. The pressure’s on in the sense that everything is far more challenging, yet conversely the pressure’s off because it’s no longer a big deal if we get things wrong. I feel a little torn sometimes: if a question is proving to be particularly difficult, do I keep picking at it even when I know that I probably can’t do it? Should I just give up early before wasting time, and then learn from my mistakes later? They ask us difficult questions not just to knock us off our pedestals of self-confidence, but to demonstrate that there’s so much more that we could be capable of.
The Engineering course at Cambridge uses a system called Standard Credit, which basically means that, once your work is above a particular level of quality, you automatically receive full marks for that laboratory session. Their reasoning is that it encourages you to do the work, but not to try too hard. I have mixed feelings about this; on one hand, I understand that it’d be impractical to mark 330 reports on their own merits. Our demonstrators probably spend less than a minute skimming through each write-up that we produce.
On the other hand, though, I find that the Standard Credit system actually encourages students to do the minimum work that’s required, which isn’t the right ethic at all. Some of my contemporaries frequently leave lab reports until the night before it’s due, knowing that everybody will get the same mark anyway, while I usually aim to have it finished days in advance. I’ll admit that I occasionally hand in laboratory work that I know has flaws that I could fix, but it’s been a long afternoon and I’m tired and I have stuff to do – I dislike the laziness in that, but any extra effort wouldn’t make any difference to my overall mark anyway. Obviously I want to be as good an engineer as I can be, and I do feel like I’m getting valuable experience from the care I put into my reports, but it often seems like any additional efforts are for nought.
So, all in all, the work life is tough. It was definitely a shock to the system when I found that things aren’t as straightforward as they used to be, and it’s only going to continue like this for the next couple of years. But hey, things will work out, I’m sure; I enjoy the challenge. Thanks for reading.
Skin by Celvas
