I remember so clearly this day last year.

It went pretty much the same this time around, except for the part about me failing. So Molvig comes up and complains about students not having gone to the right places though he was unable to tell us where it was that we were supposed to have gone to meet with the faculty. And besides, they all came up to where we were anywhere, because that's where the beer was.

He pulls me into my office and says,

"Well congratulations, you passed. I think you did pretty well except for one thing."

I'm thinking he's referring to his 101 question which I cocked up pretty badly.

"Why the fuck did you take the biology question?!"

It turns out that of all the people taking the test, I was the only person who attempted the bio question, and I got a 25% on it to boot. That's about as bad as you can do on any question and the fact that I was the only one meant that there was no discussion of cutoffs or anything, just the entire faculty having a good hearty belly laugh at how badly I suck at biology.

I explained to him how my alternative was the math question, and how linear it was, and how I tried it for a long time and couldn't get it and wasn't expecting much in the way of partial credit, leaving me with no alternative yadda yadda. Just my luck, I guess, that the bio question ends up being so hard that no one tries it but me.

To put a positive spin on it, our department is so good at biology that only one person did poorly on the question. :-)

Anyway, so I passed my written qualifier and am now a Doctoral Candidate. That's an event of monumental importance and impact on the future of my life, etc. And someone who got more excited about stuff like that would probably be out partying.

Instead, I'm working on my rocket simulator code, which currently is accelerating my rocket rapidly beyond the speed of light - backwards - within 0.6 seconds. I'd say something is amiss. Or, as Jason would say, "That's faster than the speed of light, you idiot!!"