D-15 Core Technical Crap

October is here, and the monsoon has practically disappeared from Bombay. And I feel great about that. No more having to walk on slushy streets for at least a eight months. It also means work on the road and infrastructure projects like the Bandra-Worli Sea Link, suspended due to rains, will begin again. Though the atmosphere is quite pleasant and it will remain so for a few more days until the scorching October Heat takes over for another month or so before winter sets in.

But this post is not about Bombay's weather. I have to appear for the CT-1 paper of the Institute of Actuaries of India in the first week of November. I have begun solving past question papers. The wheel will have come full circle on 5th November, 2007. A year ago, I tanked that paper. I had prepared horribly for it, considering the kind of effort required, and I remember I was quite sure in my mind that there was no hope of clearing that paper, when I walked out of my house to take that exam that day. This time, I believe my preparation should yield results and hopefully I will see my name in the results when they come out. Flunking is not an option.

I do enjoy studying for those subjects but my confidence takes a nosedive when I go through those past examination papers. Maybe that is the problem. I believe when you go into an exam you know in your bones what the result will be. And for it to be a positive one, you need to take that confidence into the examination hall, which of course comes only with the efforts you have put in. So I want to prepare well, so when I walk into that examination hall that day, I would know I will be nailing it.

The real problem I guess is learning the art of studying in a way that I call as 'compactly'. By this I mean, one should be able to wrap up studying portions of the study material and pack them in the mind so well, that one should be able to produce them at will. But this obviously needs concentrated study and thinking about the concepts beyond the text. This reduces the time it takes to study the whole syllabus and spares time for practicing problems. I am not too happy with the way the study material for CT-2 has been prepared. I had a hair-splitting experience studying it. They have introduced a lot of terms and concepts way before you actually come to know what they mean in the latter chapters. And this makes it quite difficult to study. You need to keep going back because at first you don't understand anything and when you do get to learn the stuff in the latter chapters, you have to come back to understand the previous chapter and this blows up a lot of precious time. The last 6 chapters are absolutely trash and you don't learn anything by reading them in sequence. You have to read them together and the whole picture becomes clearer as you keep coming back.

I have recently added a new bookmark to my cell phone, the mobile edition of The Times of India. The great thing about it is that I get to read The Economic Times on the go, or even when I have a free lecture in class.

And I recently calculated that if all goes well, I will be able to complete solving Joseph Gallian's Contemporary Abstract Algebra up to the 18th chapter by the end of December. That will be great! I will be able to devote more time to Analysis after that.

Let's hope that all does go well!
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