Wednesday, January 9, 2008

Trigo-what-etry?

Just took my Calculus Readiness Exam (CRE) @ UNO. Having flashbacks to high school standardized testing in rooms full of people that don't want to be there.

Basically I have 30m to answer 30 questions -- Algebra and Trigonometry. I think I did OK on the Algebra part, but I don't remember squat about Trig from 15 years ago. sin (sine) is that wavy line thing. cos (cosine) is the opposite of that. tan (tangent) and cot (co-tangent) are opposites of each other, but I don't remember anything about their math impact. What the hell are csc and that other thing?? Needless to say I've had no use for Trig for 15 years, so I'm way past rusty.

I'll get my results in a week. I feel like a begger begging to give my money to UNO, and they're playing hard to get. "Money? We don't want your money, you ignorant buffoon!"

"Please! I swear I'm smart enough to learn Calculus again," I whine. Calc. A series of classes I expect to hate. And my Chem classes start next week, another long series of classes I expect to hate. All so they'll let me pay them to take that juicy upper-level Bioinformatics stuff... -sigh- I guess I want a BS degree, but I don't expect it will do much for me. There are no jobs anyway, and there's no money.

Yup, I'm nuts.

-laugh-

1 comment:

BrotherBemused said...

Sure don't envy you your return to days of calculus and trig. I remember even less than you, since I never even took calculus and I have just a dim memory of taking trig. Hopefully there will be some significant internal reward for all this academia, since you make it sound like the external rewards are pretty nominal. Whno knew the price for finding the cure for cancer would be so steep? : )