Exam blues

Two more weeks to go, until the big qualifiers or 'the last important exam' as my advisor HT put it. I am definitely not ready, and I don't think I ever will be.

The problem is the guy who's setting up my algorithms paper is not the guy who's teaching algorithms. In fact, the guy who's setting my algorithms paper has nothing to do with algorithms (he's supposedly in databases), and to boot, the guy who's setting my algorithms paper is unpredictable at best, an Ahole at worst.

I thought I was safely out of his grasp cuz I was never in his area but he managed to muscle his way in. And the other staff think he's a pain and the just let him be. You can never get a direct answer out of him. I tried getting him to talk and he says - dont' worry you've got beautiful hair you'll pass. What the..

Between wanting to say 'fuck off, am not gonna bother' and kissing his ass was a hard choice since I wouldn't get far with either. So far, I've played it cool, giving him his ego boost by showing him I was tense and worried, and reacting just enough to his painful jokes ('the amount of time on the oral exam will be a function of how much you don't know') while not believing a word he's saying. At least I managed to get a printed email with a prescribed syllabus.

Studying biology is getting to be more fun than algorithms and that never happens to me.

Oh well. We'll see how it goes.