You know, I should feel stressed out. I’m in my last semester of my bachelor’s degree program. I intend to start graduate school in the fall. I have two standardized exams to take: the Fundamentals of Engineering exam so I can graduate from UAH, and the Graduate Record Exam so I can get into grad school. But I’m not worried.

I’m about to start the job hunt. I’m not totally happy with where I work now, but I realize that, until I’ve left engineering, I won’t be totally happy anyway. Here, I work with people I like and do reasonably interesting work. It pays pretty well. Other than the fact that they’re trying to kill me with workloads, I’m not worried, either.

Why am I not worried?
By all accounts, I should be. Have I applied for grad school? Nope. Have I signed up for the FE and GRE? Nope. [I'll be doing that next week, though.] Have I started my job hunt? Not really; the job fairs haven’t cranked up yet. Here I am, four months away from entering “the real world”, and frankly, I could care less.

That’s about the only thing that worries me.

I’ve decided that, damnit, I’m going to enjoy this semester. Have fun, party a little, try to enjoy my classes. Mind you, Analysis of Engineering Systems and Aircraft Stability and Control are about as fun as they sound like they’d be, but my Integrated Product Teams and Art History classes promise to be fun. [The latter will be fun from the material, and I have UAH hockey player Steve Charlebois in my class. Charlie and I will try to keep each other awake in there. Darkened classrooms are bad.]

Why am I not worried? I just have this great sense of peace about it all. Yes, I am mightily stressed about this semester, but that’s because I want to perform well in my classes for once. I haven’t performed well in a moderately-hard semester since I could call myself a junior … and that was three years ago. Due to the vagaries of UAH’s classification system and all the hours I had from high school, this is my third year to be a “senior”, even though this is but my fifth year of post-secondary education.

I’ve had pretty easy semesters of it for the last three years, save for Fall 2000, which I tanked at the halfway mark. In some ways, I want to have a hard semester, because I’m afraid that I’ve gotten academically soft. I sleptwalked my way to a 3.3 last semester, when I should have had a 4.0. Yes, I did many other things last semester, but still … I am by many accounts and standards an extremely intelligent [if not overly humble] individual, and dammit, ripping off a 4.0 shouldn’t be that hard.

But that’s about it. When I think about it this way, all the stress bleeds from my body. I keep thinking of the Blues Traveler song, “It Won’t Mean a Thing in a Hundred Years”. Really, little from this semester will. That’s why I refuse to get too upset over four months in a life that’s just barely begun to be lived.