Day 116: So far so good

Pretty well all of us in McGill's MLIS program seem to share a kind of quirky personality trait: extreme unfounded anxiety. The vast majority of us blow every assignment out of proportion and panic about finishing it, panic about whether we've done it right, obsess, obsess, obsess.

Lesson 116: It's a good idea to have a quick and easy way set up to check your course standing.

I have an app called iStudiez Pro that will not only remind me of when my assignments are due and keep track of whether they're group or solo; it also keeps track of the weight of each assignment and allows me to input my grade for each one and see an up to date assessment of what my grade likely is in that class.

This is a Very Good Thing around the end of semester. With all the final projects due, it would be easy enough to panic and succumb to anxiety, so having something easily available that tells you "no matter what you do right now, you couldn't fail this course if you tried" is invaluable.

Based on the mark I got on my take-home portion of the metadata exam, I think I can hit at least an A- by getting 50% or better on the final paper.

Based on all the As I've gotten in web systems design, I just need to finish the group assignment and I'm golden.

That means that the only wildcards are Archives and History of Books and Printing. I've done fine on everything so far in Archives, but I still have two major assignments (term paper and take-home exam) to do. History of Books and Printing is a great course, but is only evaluated on one project, and I don't present mine till the last class of the term.

But all this to say, it's best to give my logical mind as much ammo against my panicky headless chicken mind as possible. So when part of my brain goes "OH GOD SO MUCH TO DO I'M GOING TO FAIL AT EVERYTHING AND BE A FAILURE" my logical mind can lay on the smack down and tell it to shut it's trap; there's nothing to worry about.