Chan's Personal Blog

Well, I've been meaning to write about this for some time, but things kept coming up. This is the epic finale of a blog trilogy. If you're just joining in, you can read End Game Vol. 1 and End Game Vol. 2 for background information.

So the story picks up on Friday December 4, 2004. This was the last week of classes, so I was rushing to finish many projects, assignments, and quizzes. By Friday afternoon, I demonstrated my term project and managed to pull off a 100%. (It was a multiplayer card game that worked over the Internet.) There was a cost however, sleep deprivation being the most obvious of them. I also had my first final exam on the following Monday. Contrary to conventional wisdom, I took Friday night off and went to youth group despite the impending doom. I'm glad I went, because youth group was very refreshing, mentally and spiritually.

After cramming for the weekend, Monday came. The exam was on numerical analysis which isn't my forte. What is numerical analysis you ask? Lets just say it's math related and involves mathematical proofs. Anyways, Monday morning I went in to write the exam. I flipped through the exam to check out all the questions, and I saw two proofs that I had no idea how to approach. Shazbot! This is one of those courses where if you didn't read through the proof and understood it, you can't really answer it intelligently. I happened to only skim over these proofs because they didn't seem likely to appear on the exam based on the prof's hints in class. Anyways, using my awesome math abilities, I figured that the maximum score I could get was a 160/200 which is barely an A-. This is the best case scenario, and lets say that didn't happen. Coming out of the exam, I didn't feel too good about the exam. I was walking in with an A-, and walking out, that was not the case.

That night, I checked online to see the status of my grad school application, as I did this every night. My jaw dropped as I read this:


To paraphrase, you've been rejected, PLEASE PLEASE don't reapply. This was shocking as I had an agreement with a professor about being accepted. I had also arranged for funding for grad school. This seriously messes up my plans! Could this be a mistake? Could I have been betrayed?! After discussing the situation with Myron, we crafted an e-mail and fired it off to my prof requesting an urgent meeting.

The next day, I met with my prof and asked if he had read my grad application. He said no, have you sent it yet? I told him that my application had been refused by the department, and he said ... hmmm, I guess your application didn't get through the department of gradudate studies, you need to have a certain GPA before they forward your application to the department of computer science ... that's a shame. I am sure that it arrived to the department of computer science because when I checked online, it said it had arrived, which means I passed through the department of graduate studies. He checked his e-mail of grad applicants and couldn't find my name amongst them. Moments later, after he figured out my actual last name, he searched again, and he found it. He said, hmmmm, that's wierd, my name's not next to yours as a proposed supervisor, and look it got refused, that's why I never saw the application. This is a clerical error, I'll talk to the secretary tomorrow and we'll get this all sorted out, sorry about this.

I sighed in relief after I left his office. Thank God that this was only an error. This could have seriously complicated things. Now I could go back to worrying about exams again. In either case, human error is a very scary thang thing.

The next day, I got an e-mail from my prof saying that all is well again, and that I had been accepted. I checked online to verify this, and this is what it read:



It contained the word admitted, so I was happy, the rest of the details surely didn't matter . [Updated] The funny thing is, the following Friday, I got my grad school rejection letter in the mail. I think I'm going to frame it up next to my Master's degree (when I get it) as it illustrates a seperate divergent timeline that never happened. I'm probably going to look back on it and laugh ... or cry, whatever.

The wierd thing is, I don't feel like I've graduated and finished my undergraduate degree because I'm starting a second degree right away. It's not like high school where there's a lot of hype building up towards graduation. High school graduation involved a grad trip with my friends, and an aftergrad party that involved a sketchy old guy posing as a DJ. In either case, I'm sure it'll feel more real once I get my graduation photos done, and try on a few regalias for convocation.

So, I'm in ... I'm finally in grad school. It all starts tomorrow, and I'll get a new shiny grad student card. This has been quite the journey. Thank you all for your prayers and support. This concludes the end game trilogy. Cheers.