From Facebook
From August 18 -- James is working on surviving the stat department's grad student boot camp...
What does this mean you might be asking? Let me explain the past week of my life.
On Monday morning I arose at 6ish...the exact time is vague to me...the days have begun running together it seems. I got ready for the day and out the door, because of certain people keeping me up late, I was tired and so I planned to head to campus early get my mug and fill it before the boot camp started. By the time everything was settled and I sat down in a chair for the boot camp orientation meeting at 8, I was already wishing I hadn't gotten up and out of bed. Now this is where it begins to become interesting. For 2 hours, Dr. Whiting (the faculty member assigned to direct the efforts of the next two weeks) talked about stat theory and miscellaneous things. He assigned some easy homework and we broke for lunch about 10:30ish [who has lunch that early is beyond me...] around noon-ish we got together again and began reviewing statistical methods.
I think I need to explain something here...the purpose of boot camp is to review the concepts of the core 4 classes the department has. These are 2 course sequence in theory [Stat 441 & 442] and a 2 course sequence in methods [Stat 336 & 337]. Mind you at best this is 2 semesters of 14 weeks of instruction. Doing the 'university-minded' math applied to the courses and the number of credit hours and the like you end up with 630 hours you would put into the 4 courses.
For those that need it, you take the number of credit hours a course is, multiply by 14 and get the number of instructional hours in the course. Multiply the instructional time by 3 to get the total time needed for that course over the length of a semester. With Stat 441, 442 and 337 being 3 credit hours and Stat 336 being a beast of a 6 credit hour course you have a lot of time there.
Again that 630 hours of work and instruction is spread out over minimum of 2 semesters with a potential of doing it over more. Now, in 2 weeks we are reviewing what some of us (I count 4 or 5 that have complete both sequences) did over time and that most of everyone else has never really had presented in this manner. So for the 2 weeks they are playing catch up, and others are playing remember, and I am feeling in over my head.
So the result is a lot of time spent on campus. In reality Monday was not so bad because we were barely getting started, and Tuesday we had minimal homework. Now this is where the fun fact of what was going on blows up. Wednesday and Thursday the homework was piled on. Now I dont mind it, nor do I think it bad, it just is that being to campus by 8 and then spending most of the day either 'reviewing' material or doing the assigned homework, and not leaving campus until after 6 starts to get at you.
So when I say I am working on surviving I am really working on trying to make it thru the day and to bed at a reasonable time to get to the next day.
~u