On Frustration

There's plenty, here, to frustrate. Sometimes, as you walk down the halls of the 'Tvte, the air practically thrums with stifled ambition. There are students, of course, freshmen who just failed their first test; seniors who just failed their fiftieth (it hurts just as much every time, believe me.) There are grad students and post-docs, whose research has officially stalled for months at a time. There are, of course, the faculty, who are presumably all heartily sick of people failing classes and screwing up experiments. You've heard, I presume, of palpable tension? Probably thought it was merely a cute descriptive phrase. Well, tension is palpable. I've felt it.

It feels sticky.

The problem is that the 'Tvte functions primarily as a pressure cooker; and this particular pot roast takes four years to cook. I don't use pressure cookers frequently - I hate pot roast and firmly believe that meat should never be cooked until its proteins break down past the point of mastication - but I understand that the point is that you don't just turn the damn thing on or off whenever you feel like it - you gotta keep it under pressure, right, or it just won't be pot roast. To push a metaphor way, way past the breaking point, MIT likes its students well done, and I prefer my meat on the rarer side. Once again, I go head to head with the halls of higher learning. Past conflicts include: sleep (I am a fan, the administration clearly is not); class (I believe that there are better things to be doing after 3pm on Friday or before 12pm, well, ever); grades (I understand that theoretically, As on tests are possible. I just wish they were possible for me).

There are less than twenty days of class left in the semester, so most of the tension I'm currently palpating is academia-related, wherein those around me realize that, sure, you got an A on that test if you turn it upside-down and squint, but the likelihood of the TA repeating that exact process when entering your grade into the system... not so likely. Ergo, panic.

The frustration manifested itself in my friends and me last night as we sat in the depressingly lit fifth floor of the student center, trying to crank out an 8.02* p-set in under four hours (did it work? Not. At. All.) Basically, we all ended up sitting around one of the low coffee tables that someone, somewhere once convinced themselves students would be able to do work on, squawking at each other. Yes, you heard it. One of the fundamental identities in electromagnetic physics is that flux, or phi, is equal to the magnetic field (B), multiplied by area (A) and the cosine of the angle from the horizontal. In other words, BAcos(theta). BAcos! BAcos! Try saying it out loud.

We're all, very slowly, going insane.