Am I Done?

My senior and last year at WPI is effectively finished. My last track meet has come and gone. How do I feel?

I’ve put myself under a lot of stress lately. The last minute rush to finish two major degree requirements here at WPI, the MQP and the Suff, had me wondering if I was actually going to graduate. To top it all off, this is my last track season. I’ve been running track for years now, I’ve been training for this season in particluar since I missed last year due to a bad hamstring injury.

My MQP, on Micro-Aerial Vehicles fell far short of my early expectations. Several factors had an impact. Two out of four group members didn’t put in nearly enough effort. I suppose I could have picked up the slack myself—but I was taking some extra computer classes (I like coding), and spending at least 20 hours a week on track. I simply didn’t have the time to do everything, especially due to a large learning curve for some of the, undocumented, equipment in the WPI Aero Lab. I was a bit irritated when all group members received the same grade. However, I cannot blame anyone except myself for being too nice (or weak) to call attention to group defficiencies. In the final summation: I learned a lot, and that off-sets my disappointment.

My Suff, on Wagner’s Siegfried Idyll, turned out pretty well. Of all the projects I’ve done here at WPI I’m most pleased with the writing and organization in this one. It wasn’t an easy process. It’s a project that most students complete in their sophomore year. Speaking from experience, I do not recommend leaving a major graduation requirement to the final weeks of your college career. I was lucky that I wrote a good paper and my advisor was kind enough to accept it.

Track has been my best experience here at WPI. I’ve really enjoyed the sport and hanging out with the people on the team (the absolute best people at WPI). I’d have liked my final season to have been somewhat better. I still don’t fell as though I’ve run up to my potential. After having put in so much time—that’s a bit depressing. I’ve been caught between acedemics and atheletics. The result is that neither were as glittering as they could have been.

I’ve brought all this stress on myself. And I have to wonder if I did it on purpose. I wonder if I thought it’d be a great way to add some spice to my life. Or, I wonder if I, realizing that I couldn’t do both as well as I wanted, buried my competitive spirit. The perfectionist attitude that drives me to take great pride in the things I do, and to do them well. I actually thought I had lost it recently. I felt like I was lost, caring about nothing. Turns out—I was in the gym today, contemplating putting my fist through a plexiglass divider, when I realized that the competitive spark was indeed still within me. I had just buried it deep. Man, is it ever pissed.