Intensity

Going to Georgia Tech means that you pass on at least 50% of the typical college experience.

Or that's what I gather from television.

There's the normal stuff like too many drunken parties and football.  But besides the rampant nerdiness what seems dissimilar is the sheer amount of work.

My memory of college is moving into a dorm in the fall, going to marching band practice and the football games, holding a few board game nights with my roommates and our friends, taking a 3-4 day trip somewhere over Spring Break, and until we moved out in the spring we were otherwise either going to class or doing homework or working on a group project for the rest of our waking hours.  That's how it was for everyone.  Of course there were a few activities, like my roommates and I would normally select a few television shows we would watch together (Gilmore Girls, Grey's Anatomy, Desperate Housewives, Lost, and Heroes over the years).  But oftentimes one or more of us would either do homework during the show or not watch it at all in order to do work.  The constant state of being was work, such that someone who was not doing work was actively and mindfully taking a break from work in order to work harder when they returned.  There was not "free time" - there were activities deliberately carved out of work time to prevent insanity.  But sometimes you couldn't afford even that and you just went insane.

And all that work didn't mean anything if you didn't know your stuff.  There might have been A-for-effort classes at Tech but I didn't get to take them.  Professors made it clear that classes weren't graded on the premise everyone started at As and they took points off.  No, everyone started at an F and had to earn points to get to an A.  I actually took very few classes where points had any absolute meaning.  In most of my engineering classes everything was graded on a curve, so you did not need a certain amount of points to get an A - you needed to get more points than everyone else to get an A.

One class that didn't use a curve was Physical Chemistry II, which was the quantum mechanics class.  I took that class the year it was at 8 am, and the professor was the hairiest man I've ever seen.  In that class, getting 33% of the questions right on the test was a C.  An A was 66%.  I think that demonstrated well how impossible the material was that no one could know 100% of it.

When the workload at Tech got especially bad, like at the end of a semester when projects were due and everyone was studying for final exams and you had to move out of your dorm room within 24 hours of your last test so you had to pack your entire room while you studied, there was a special state you could get into that I can only describe as "intense".  It was a single minded focus on the tasks at hand with a cold and efficient prioritization of all the other features of your life.  Your mind became hypervigilant and you could lay almost all emotion aside and solely work.  Everything fell by the wayside.  You would know exactly how long you could go without doing laundry, without eating, without buying food, without taking out the trash, so you could work as long as possible before having to waste time on those things.  You would say no to friends and fun with no regret or guilt.  It was all gone.  You were just an automaton with one goal: survival.

Since college, the intensity has been very rare.  But now it's back, and it's almost comforting.  Being a single-minded extremely busy automaton is way better than being a pretty busy worrywart.  Cold, hard, and focused.

I will say, it's easier to deal with when you have a car, your own washing machine, and enough money to buy convenience foods.