The over-achieving urge

It's baaaaaaaaack ...

When I was younger, I assumed that I would get the best grades I could.  It just never occurred to me that anything less than the best was acceptable, or impossible.  I would do all the homework, I would listen in class, and then I would get good grades.  The end.  There were some exceptions (I was never really exceptional at math league type stuff, and I did NOT understand analogies very well until high school), but in general, I was a top student.  Then again, so were many people I knew, but that's just what was expected of us.

Somewhere in middle school, my drive sort of slowed.  It wasn't that I wasn't doing well; I just started to procrastinate a lot.  I never really learned how to take good notes or study.  I still did my homework and did well, but the drive sort of died.  In high school, I did pretty well--well enough to get into a great university, but some Cs started popping up on my report card.  I don't know how I got through calculus; I retook every test, often gave up on the homework, and took the shittiest notes on the planet.  But I got a 5 on the test, so ... I didn't learn my lesson.

I didn't not try in college.  I worked relatively hard, but procrastination hounded me on a constant basis.  I wrote papers the night before, no matter how long they needed to be, or how much work really needed to go into them.*  I slept through large lectures, skipped half of my intro biology classes, and studied by panicking the night before the test and trying to read the textbook.  I made Dean's List four out of eight semesters, but often didn't retain any information from any science classes.  It was frustrating feeling like I didn't even know my own major.**

Work was a mixed bag.  I often wasn't sure what was expected of me, and certainly did not go above and beyond when it came to organization or reading papers.  Again, procrastination was a major problem.  Once it was clear that my job was totally safe, I think I started do actually do better work, but I certainly no longer felt a lot of pressure.

But now, as a graduate student, I'm surprising myself with how much work I'm willing to do.  We've had one week of classes, and I've been getting work done well ahead of time.  I've been taking extremely detailed notes, and rewriting them.  I did work all weekend (Friday night***, Saturday afternoon and night, Sunday afternoon and evening).  I came home during the day today ... and got work done.  I am actually feeling uncomfortable because I have to give a presentation on Wednesday on protein folding, and while I've been working on reading a very dense paper (essentially, that's what I'm presenting), I haven't yet prepared the presentation itself.  In college, I wouldn't be reading this paper until maybe midnight tomorrow night, and I probably would take quick, embarrassingly bad notes to "present" on Tuesday morning, mere hours before the class.

I'm not sure sure where the drive came from.  I haven't felt it in years, to the point where I don't remember when I last felt it.  But I am determined to get an amazing grade on our first biochem exam, even though I just learned that the exams are so difficult that it's common for people to get a B grade with a 28%.  Maybe it's because there are only five of us (nine total, including the other program) and if I don't do well, I'll feel embarrassed because it'll stand out.  Maybe it's because I actually know some of the things I want out of life, whereas even thoughout college, I had no clear idea.  Maybe it's because I'm disappointed in how I did in high school and college, and want my (hopefully) final leg of my education to go splendidly.

But either way, I feel guilty for stopping to even write this blog post.  Wow, right?

* This includes my final project my senior year.  It was a 35-page paper, which I wrote in one night and got a B+ on.

** Specifically, my biology major.  I did very well (minus the final project) in women's studies.  There are a lot of reasons for this, but the classes were actually harder than biology classes in a lot of ways.

*** Can I get a gil?  (CA ARE YOU READING THIS.)