#99. Anti-Senioritis (Tuesday, April 17, 2012)
What was your best day…of having your extreme paranoia pay off?
There is senioritis. There is anti-senioritis. And then there’s me.
Let’s go back to my last term of undergrad. At the start of it, despite my A- average, I was paranoid beyond reason about not graduating on time. Especially after seeing my best friend Masato’s (#112) 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 got that before the same thing happened to me.
Anti-senioritis doesn’t even begin to describe it. It was 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 I could ease up by then; but no, I was still deathly afraid (and even 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, once the no-arbitrage intuition finally clicked.
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. (I was also the one grading everything, but I kept quiet about that given my paranoia about perceived conflicts of interest, #115.) Since most of them were in the same almost-graduated position as me, I was relieved I didn’t have to catch anybody cheating. But according to my roommate Kurt, I was looking “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 aced1. 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—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 (#121), who was himself considering grad school in economics, was 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. 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 meant more to me than the grade itself, 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.