#92. Anti-Senioritis (Tuesday, April 17, 2012)

What was your best day…of having your extreme paranoia pay off?

There is senioritis¹. And there’s anti-senioritis. And then there’s me.

Let’s go back to my last term of undergrad. At the start of it, I was, despite my A- average, paranoid beyond reason about not graduating on time. Especially after seeing my best friend Masato’s (#104) girlfriend lose motivation and drop out a few months earlier. My logic was: no matter how much I screwed up later on, an Honors Mathematics degree from Waterloo would set me up for life in terms of always being able to get a decent job. So I better damn well make sure I get that before the same thing happens to me.

Anti-senioritis doesn’t even begin to describe it. It was just complete overkill. I studied harder than I ever had in my life and was going into finals with an A+ average. You’d think that by then I could ease up a bit; but no, I was still deathly afraid (and had one or two nightmares) of getting below 25% on the final and failing. I still don’t know how I was able to ramp things up from there, but I did.

And I left Monday’s all-important Financial Derivatives exam feeling pretty good, despite a binomial tree section I had to redo halfway through when I figured out the tricky no-arbitrage intuition we were supposed to use.

The next day, I had to get up early to proctor a fourth-year Financial Statement Analysis exam that several of my friends were taking (#106).² As most of them were in the same almost-graduated position as me, I was relieved that I didn’t have to catch anybody cheating. But according to my roommate Kurt, I was looking pretty “intense and bad-ass” the way I stood at the front and walked around the room.

Right after that, I had a Microeconomics exam, which I aced³. Then, it was nonstop studying for my last two exams on Thursday. It was a lot to fit in to a day and a half, but somehow I managed it. And managed it very well.

I just remember that feeling walking out of the final Macroeconomics exam. My program director (and instructor for that Financial Statement Analysis class) Bruce Maitland (#113), who had been entertaining thoughts of going to grad school himself for economics, had been taking that class as well. So I went up with him to his office for him to give me the students’ exams as he congratulated me on everything. And I thought to myself: I finally have nothing to worry about…unless I lose these exams (which fortunately, I didn’t).

My average that term ended up being 96.8, probably highest of all the graduating students. But that’s not the point. The point is: through my obsessive, life-dependent studying in Financial Derivatives, I achieved a major breakthrough where every complicated thing I came across in the subject started to make perfect sense. Which really meant a lot to me, given that in my first two years I had been so lost with all the math concepts that I almost failed Linear Algebra and Advanced Calculus.

More importantly, all of this gave me a feeling – for maybe the first time ever – that financial mathematics was an academic field that I could actually excel at. Pretty timely, as I was about to start a Master’s program in Economics in September while still trying to figure out what the hell I was going to do with my life.

From Wikipedia: “Senioritis is a colloquial term mainly used in the United States and Canada to describe the decreased motivation toward studies displayed by students who are nearing the end of their high school, college, and graduate school careers, or the end of the school year in general. It combines the word senior with the suffix -itis, which technically denotes inflammation but in colloquial speech is assumed to mean a general illness.”
I was also the one grading everything, but I tried to keep quiet about that, given my paranoia about perceived conflicts of interest.
Literally got 100% in the courses, i.e. no mistakes on any assignments or exams.