people have a hard time believing i hate school.why? your guess is as good as mine. i like to believe though that it has something to do with the fact that they think i am smart. okay, i am smart(that was my failed attempt at being modest.) and now, i have one more reason to hate school,; i can’t blog as regularly as i would want to, for multiple reasons. two of those reasons would be that i am having a hard time getting actuarial mathematics into my head(again, did i say i am smart?) and that i go to school where the administration would rather invest in anything else but their WI-fi.( read, i am just too lazy to go to school to access WI-fi, so I’d rather just blame the administration. i call it being Kenyan). anyway, school isn’t all bad. for one, its one more post on this awesome blog. so i thought i would do the life lessons that my units have taught me during these few weeks of school.

anyone with the slightest knowledge about probability will tell you that if the probability of an event occurring is zero, then that event is an impossibility. that is what i thought too till this probability and statistics lecture we had some weeks ago.get this, for continuous random variables, having a probability of zero doesn’t always mean that the event represented by the random variable cannot occur. and that got me thinking about the many assignments i did not do just because most people couldn’t get the right answers. and more importantly, how many things i have given up on just because people thought i couldn’t do it. so as trite as this is, i am going to go ahead and say, just because it hasn’t been done, does not mean it cannot be done.

it is a common misconception that calculus is hard.in fact, that is the only thing most people know about calculus.but if there is anything calculus has taught me, it’s that things get easy over time. you just have to stick at it long enough. i remember being a freshman and calculus one was stranger than Greek and all the ancient languages combined. i still do not believe i passed those exams. fast forward to calculus three and i actually look forward to calculus lectures. and at the expense of sounding like a nerd with no life, i am going to say that given the choice between a night out and calculus, i would choose calculus six out of seven of the times.

general insurance has taught me to prioritize. there is just no way i would allocate the same amount of time to calculus or actuarial math and general insurance. this particular lesson is vital to me because i have an especially hard time prioritizing when it comes to people in my life. for a long time now, i have pretended i believe that everyone is equally important. but that was until i had to choose if i would spend thursday night prepping for an actuarial math or general insurance test. i chose general insurance because thursday had been a long day, and i was tired and i was having a hard time concentrating. and when i finally fell asleep, i grudgingly accepted that it is okay to invest more emotion,time, money or whatever i could invest in someone to people who cared enough to do the same for me. that it is okay to severe some relationships, or at least, spend the very least on people who just do not care.

numerical analysis is one depressing lecture. i am usually so exhausted by the time i am out of the lecture hall, i cannot bare the thought of having to walk five minutes to go get something to eat. this is because so much happens in just one lecture, its practically impossible to get it all in. so they just end up jumbled up in my head. and that is life. so much happens, you lose sight of whats important. you are bombarded with pain and joy, freedom and rules, life and death, sometimes you forget what’s what. so here is what i do; a few hours after every numerical analysis lecture, i go through everything again, and it always looks easier to swallow. so maybe I’ll just take a break every once in a while, give my life some breathing space and hope it gets easier to live.

linear algebra has proved to me that i have the resilience and determination to do things that i might think are just beyond me. so this lecture is usually immediately after numerical analysis. a lot of times, i am usually like,”nah, I’ll just go back to the house, crawl in my bed and sleep the day away.” yet week after week,i find myself sitting through a linear algebra lecture, listening to a not so very interesting lecturer, and actually writing readable notes. so i guess the reward comes when people borrow my book and go like,”damn it!how do you write so well?”. and so for the rest of the day, i let those complements just get me through.

computer interactive statistics is my favorite unit. which is ironical because it is usually on a Friday afternoon and i am usually already operating on weekend mode. but this is one lecture that i do not have to worry about how i look. i can burden my small self with a baggy shirt and even baggier shorts and walk into the computer lab looking like i just crawled out of hell and no one tells me shit.and it gets better. the highlight of my afternoon is the coding. i think its sheer pleasure how you write a few lines of codes and the results are just amazing. i adore the way i can create a very detailed graph by just a command. its like a miracle, you know, things just appear.no pressure. and so as my friend put it, “you don’t always need a plan. sometimes you just need to breathe, let go and see what happens.”

and finally, actuarial mathematics has shown me that things get complicated. i remember this one particular lesson feeling like i was drowning in a sea of exponentials, probabilities and rates of mortality.i tried so hard to understand what was going on i ended up thinking about french fries instead. so it was around 8.30 on a Monday morning and all that was going through my head was,”is it too early to eat fries? because fries is all i can think about.” and then went to,” oh god, i am going to die. if i eat fries daily, doesn’t that increase the probability of me dying before my next birthday? if so, what would my rate of mortality be?” but in retrospect, I’d say i was not too far off; i drifted away in context. and so i have learnt to appreciate the simple pleasures of life. like being able to eat french fries with just your hands. so when i finally got to buy fries, i dipped each one in really thick tomato sauce(regardless of the fact that i hate tomatoes and all its products) and relished every moment of it. i just didn’t have the energy or time to get a folk. plus, i figured my life was already complicated.