2 Presentations, 1 Quiz and Valentine’s Day

First off… Happy Valentine’s Day to everyone.

I just got to blog about what an amazing day I have on Valentine’s Day, but it’s not because I received tons of chocolates from hot university classmates. If you are looking for something juicy or even raunchy, then my blog is obviously not the best place to come to. Sooooo… as you might have guessed from the title, it’s once again about my university/work life. However, this week was really special for me because I have so many things to do, all of which requires my immediate attention.

First of all, my boss has a long list of stuff for me to do, but I won’t really blog about them. Just an interesting thing at my workplace… One of my colleagues remarked that I have a very good life, because she claims that when everyone is pressurized over an issue, it doesn’t affect me. It makes me think that people sometimes associate others as being in a better position just because they are not doing the same thing. Seriously though, no one in the company understands my job scope and they just assume I’m not stressed. Maybe I need to complain and whine about my problems to give them an impression that my work isn’t simple. But… it’s just so pointless.

Today was a really busy day, since I have 2 presentations and a quiz. Despite working full time on Mondays and Tuesdays, I still took on the role of consolidating slides and giving them the final touchups for both presentations. The crazy thing was that I promised to shop with my brother last saturday, which took up half of my day and I had to clock my full 40 hours of worktime on Sunday. Therefore… with only Monday and Tuesday nights, I had to rush for 2 presentations and study for a quiz if possible. To make matters worse, I got hit by a Fever on Monday, which decreased my productivity to an all-time low for this year. In the end, I chose not to study for my quiz as I felt that it’s more important to be accountable to group work.

So… when I took the quiz this morning, the questions seem to be in a different language. I think I’ll score 7/10 for the quiz which is way below my acceptance level, since I always aim to score full marks, even if I don’t have time to study. I believe that not having enough time is not an excuse, since everyone has 24 hours a day. Anyway, the quiz is over and it’s pointless to discuss how I could have done better, so I just prepared for my next showdown… a presentation.

I wanted to get an A+, but our group only got an A and I sort of regretted not sticking with my stand. The night before… I told another group member that we went into more depth in the article that I worked on with her than the other article my other team members worked on, so maybe we should present our article after they presented theirs. My reasoning was that if your first article is better than the second, the tutor will sort of grade base on her last impression. True enough… the tutor mentioned that the second article’s analysis was not as deep as the first, but she’ll give us A nevertheless. Will we get A+ if I had followed what I thought? I would never know, but it’s not important anymore. This is only one out of four presentations for the module and we can always do better.

Shortly after my lunch break, I had my second presentation for another module, which is non-graded. However, I went ahead and asked the tutor where our group stands with our presentation. He didn’t say anything bad and just remarked that our analysis had gone beyond what’s required, so I’ll assume it’s good. With that, the busy period of my life is over once again and I’ll go back to a more “normal” workload.

I started thinking of motivational theories and stuff when I was in the train today. With only two hands and one brain, there’s only just so much I can do and I’m wondering how I can push my group members to work harder. When my team members do not meet my expectations, I usually make up for these inadequacies by taking on more load instead. However, I was thinking of how I can maximize the potential of each team member, which is very important if I’m going to be a boss one day. I haven’t come to a conclusion yet, but that’s the fun thing about life. Not everything has a conclusion and we struggle in our daily lives just to get better at the things we do. If everything has a clear-cut conclusion, won’t life be really boring?