I have an algebra prelim in eleven hours. Sweet Jesus' cock, I am going to fucking die*.
*Note I am not actually going to fucking die. I've been obsessively studying for this thing. I've done the last eleven years' worth of prelims. I can fart the Sylow Theorems in my sleep. I can compute Galois groups with one foot up my ass. By any objective standard, I'm pretty well-prepared. That doesn't change the fact that a horrific amount of pressure goes with these exams, or that what they test is essentially meaningless. At this level, the only sensible exams one could give are take-home things, to be done at one's leisure, with a certain amount of research and some nice cups of tea and raspberry-filled butter cookies. Something involving highly nontrivial results, not just tricksy applications of low-level theorems in ways that reward rote memorisation of old exams.
On the bright side, I totally know more than enough to teach something equivalent to my undergraduate abstract algebra class now. The structure theorem for modules over a PID is a natural for that setting.
I'm going to sleep now, on the grounds that the sooner I do, the sooner I can wake up, take this bitch, and get it all over with.
The world is a vampire**.
**Note*** the world is not actually a vampire.
***Do footnotes make you want to play Johnny Cash's cover of 'Hurt' over and over and over?****
****No, they don't. It's prelims that do that.
PS...Prelims.
Posted by aloysius at September 14, 2003 10:58 PM | TrackBack |