So you clicked on something called "Can't be arsed". You already know what you're in for. Let's not waste each other's time pretending otherwise.
I'm in the middle of exams and I cannot be arsed. Not tired. Just cannot be fucking arsed.
I've also never once bought the sacred little gospel everyone recites at you, the "just study the material and you'll pass" one, like it's some ancient secret and not the most boring instruction ever handed to a living human. I despise it. There's nothing in it. Nothing to make, nothing to solve, nothing to crack open and figure out. You take a block of theory, you shovel it into your skull, you shovel it back out onto an answer sheet two weeks later, and you forget most of it by August. That's the whole holy ritual. And we all sit around nodding like it's the pinnacle of human achievement.
The procrastination has been, and I say this with my chest fully out, world class. Elite. Olympic. If they handed out the diploma for THAT I'd be writing the valedictorian speech right now instead of this.
Except it wasn't nothing, which is deeply inconvenient, because I had such a good excuse going. While I was heroically not opening my notes, I cracked two programs and a game. Wrote a keygen for the first two. Clean, elegant little things, I almost teared up. Unpacked and patched the third. (No, you're not getting the names. I don't wanna go to jail. Nice try feds!)
Honestly, that is roughly a thousand times more interesting than anything on my exam timetable. You sit down with a binary and you work out how the thing thinks. Where it checks the license. Where it branches. What it's guarding and how embarrassingly badly it guards it. It pushes back. It could not care less how many hours you "studied", either you understood it or you didn't, and it tells you on the spot, to your face, no curve, no mercy.
My reverse engineering has leveled up beautifully over a stretch where, officially, on paper, I have achieved nothing. The thing I am SUPPOSED to be doing bores me clean through the floorboards, and the thing I am "wasting my time" on is the only thing in my life currently teaching me anything. Somehow I'm still the problem in this story. Sure. Okay. Noted.
The people teaching me are clever. Frighteningly clever, some of them. Real research, real papers, work I couldn't touch on my best day with both hands and a running start. Full respect.
None of that means you can teach, though. Knowing everything and being able to get it into another human's head are two wildly different skills, and almost nobody here has the second one. The knack for actually getting it across, making it land, giving a lecture that's alive in the room instead of dead on arrival. You can be a bottomless ocean of knowledge and still have none of it, and what you've got then is a man reading slides at me for three straight hours with no break in a tone that could sedate a horse from across a field. What, precisely, am I meant to do with that?
(There is exactly one professor I admire. One. ONE. And I admire him an absurd, frankly unhealthy amount, so if you ever somehow stumble onto this - props, sincerely, I love you, you are single handedly the reason I have not fully lost the plot.)
The practical side is a joke that tells itself. Three computer related courses so far. The ONLY one where we actually touched a computer in the lab was the very first programming course, first semester. Every course after that was "yeah, you'll study the lab part on your own, the lab sessions are just written midterms". A written test. For a lab. You are teaching us to use computers by specifically keeping us away from the computers. Inspired. Visionary, even. No follow up questions, I assume.
A lab is the doing. That is the point of the room, the only one it has. You sit at the machine, you get handed exercises, you build the thing, you break it, you watch it spit out an error you've never seen in your life, you fix it, and somewhere in that whole mess you learn how the tool really behaves in your hands. You do not get an ounce of that off a sheet of paper.
So why the papers? Why is the practical half of a practical subject being graded with a written exam? What is a written test on a hands-on skill even measuring, other than whether I memorized a description of the work instead of, you know, doing the work? It's like teaching someone to swim with a slideshow and then grading them on an essay about water. We should be in the lab, on the machines, getting shown how to do this stuff, in the exact environment we're meant to do it in. That is the reason a room full of computers exists in the first place. So what is this teaching me? Seriously. What is the lesson here, other than how to write neatly about work I was never once allowed to touch?
By the way, the evaluation method on one of these courses was the most braindead thing I have witnessed with my own two eyes. I'll walk you through it like the perfectly normal, totally sane exam a functioning institution would obviously design:
Cool. Cool cool cool. Already clownish on its own. But it gets dumber.
Some of these assessments had actual fucking TYPOS in them. And there is no way on God's green earth to tell an accidental typo apart from one they planted on purpose. So at that point you are not being tested on whether you know the material. You are being tested on whether the person who wrote the exam proofread it. And you sit there praying they did.
That's the assessment? That's the thing my grade hangs off?
But who cares about you, right. We're a shiny new school of engineering now, we simply must "keep up with the others", we simply must "raise the difficulty to maintain our level". So you raise the difficulty by sprinkling in typos and coin flips instead of, oh I don't know, teaching the fucking material better. Get your shit together. Go fuck yourself, sincerely, and with love. Kick me out if you read this and you are a little snowflake, I don't give a fuck.
The people have been incredible. Some of the best humans I have ever met, and my friends here right now are the absolute goats, ride or die, the best of them. That part of uni has been unreal. Zero complaints, not one.
It is also my first year. My FIRST one. I barely know how to study yet, let alone study well. I'm still working out how the exams here even run, how to pace myself across a stretch like this, how to find a rhythm that isn't just blind panic at 2am the night before. Which is fine. That's what a first year is for.
So you do not need to come at us this hard. You don't forge a first year by laying traps and calling it standards. "ACADEMIC LEVEL" my ass. There is nothing high level about a quiz that docks me for your own typo. You want to prove your level? Make the course interesting for once. Set something that tests whether I understood the material, instead of whether I can win a round of spot the error against a ticking clock. I know that's a tall order for people who have apparently been reading off the same yellowed notes since before I was born, but give it a shot. Teach like you give a damn, then evaluate us like adults. That's the ask. All of it.
I have huge projects queued up. Loads of them. And yes, I KNOW, I need the diploma, I'm not pretending the piece of paper means nothing. But these two, three weeks feel like a black hole where nothing gets built. Doesn't sound like much said out loud, "two or three weeks". Try living inside it as a hole.
A day that goes by without making something is a wasted day. Studying old theory isn't making anything. Therefore exams are a tall stack of wasted days. That is what I have believed for as long as I can remember. Clean. Simple. Case closed.
First half I'll die on. The second half turned out to be bullshit, and I only figured out why recently, so let me correct myself before some smug researcher does it for me.
Creativity, the actual research kind, does not fall out of the sky. Nobody has ever invented anything out of an empty skull. Every "original" idea is a remix. You cram an obscene amount of what already exists into your head, and THEN, only then, you spot the gap nobody noticed, the contradiction, the question nobody could be arsed to ask. You cannot find the hole in a field you have never walked through. "Standing on the shoulders of giants" isn't a humble little fridge magnet quote, it is the literal mechanism. The boring intake IS the raw material. No intake, no output. You can't fire a gun you never loaded and then stand there looking shocked at it.
Theory itself was never the enemy. Cramming theory to vomit onto an answer sheet is NOT the same animal as learning theory because some problem you actually give a shit about is standing over you demanding it. Research wires the theory straight into a live question you're chasing. Exams rip it out of every context it ever had and make you memorize it for a Tuesday. One of those builds something. The other is storage and retrieval with a deadline stapled to it. They feel completely different because they ARE completely different. So no, I wasn't wrong that exams feel creatively dead. I was wrong about why. It was never the theory. It's the format.
The "or maybe I'm just a lazy ass" question. Because believe me, I do ask myself that one at 3am. No. Lazy is not wanting to do any of it. I'm cracking software at hours I will not admit to in writing, and stacking up projects I am itching to start. That is not a man with no drive. That is a man whose drive flatly refuses to fire for low stakes busywork. Different problem entirely.
Summer. For real. To mess about, go to the beach, switch the brain off for five consecutive minutes... and then go completely feral on these projects. Things have to move. Stuff has to ship. I'm sick of it all living rent free in my head.
Uni has to move too, which drags me to the one part I can't just swear at and walk away from. But fear not, dear reader, I have a workaround: build an actual schedule for next semester. Not a fantasy timetable I'll have abandoned by Wednesday. A real one. One that survives contact with my own attention span, which is, frankly, the hardest exam they've never set me. Whether the workaround holds is, as ever, a problem for the next build. But that one is mine to pass or fail, so I can't exactly tell it to go fuck itself.
Anyway. Back to not studying.
