a wake up call

I just had three of the worst hours in quite a while. Three hours filled by frustration, rage and humiliation. The spectroscopy workshop began well enough, untill one of the instructors led me down a path that brought on my foul mood. He suggested I use a formula which turned out to be pretty useless with regard to the question I was working on. Then, almost one hour later, still working on the same problem, I began repeatedly keying in the wrong numbers on my calculator. By this point the satisfactory sensation brought on by being way ahead of the people across the table from me had vanished entirely, not only because of my frustration, but because I was in fact no longer ahead. I had spent almost two hours solving four problems, out of a total of twelve. My professor kindly pointed out that an equivalent question to the one I had been struggling with would have been allotted approximately fifteen minutes for my exam. Clearly there was a problem. To add insult to injury, upon returning later he casually remarked that question six was in fact really easy, on a second glance he remarked "I don't know why I included that question, it is so easy." I'm sure he didn't realise that I had been staring at the question at loss for how to begin; at least I did as well as I could to make sure I was emitting an aura of confidence.

It is in fact incredible, how stupid and inferior a professor like Andrew de Mello can make you feel; one might almost assume his PhD was in intimidatory tactics. Despite my disheartening experience, I find myself upbeat. After all, one of my reasons for coming to Imperial was to discover that I'm not the most intelligent person around. It also reminds me that though my Christmas may not be white, it will most certainly be intellectually enriching...