Pre-Graduation Quarter Syndrome occurs in students either entering or in the last quarter of their degree program.
With the hustle and bustle of school, job applications, and graduate school applications, the student can easily become overwhelmed. As their calendar fills up and their general motivation trends downwards, the student may begin to forget to complete some of their obligations. This overloading of tasks can lead to symptoms such as forgetting deadlines.
I just had an awesome weekend in San Francisco at Outside Lands. For those who are unaware, Outside Lands is a three day music festival hosted in Golden Gate park. Musicians and artists from across the globe (including an indie artist from Norway–looking at you Boy Pablo) and food vendors native to the Bay are gathered to celebrate. The great thing about this festival is that the music spans the whole spectrum, from rap to folk. The festival starts at noon and ends at 10PM. Given travel times to and from the crowded event, the festival can easily consume 72 hours of your life.
For someone who is taking three computer science courses and applying to jobs and graduate school, that’s a lot of time to take off. Not to mention that my girlfriend and I drove up to the Bay from southern California. Set the time consumption count to 96 hour would ya?
Over the weekend I forgot to respond to my team’s standup discussion and actually I had to make my video for discussing my project contributes pretty last minute as well. I’d been in the middle of catching up on my operating systems coursework (thanks to smallsh), when I realized that I had an hour and a half to record, post, and upload my contributes to my group project thus far. To be even more frank, this blog post is due in about 50 minutes here.
I love getting to celebrate and enjoy weekends, especially right after the excitement of getting a fantastic job offer, but this festival couldn’t have fallen on a worse weekend in the quarter. This week I have and had six online assessments to complete for job applications on top of what is considered to be the most difficult programming assignment in the whole OSU online degree program. Talk about a doozy of a week.
You might be wondering why I am completing six online assessments for jobs if I have a fantastic offer in hand. Well, the company that I have an offer for told me last week that they make data driven offers for their compensation packages. Fantastic! Except that apparently, their data has found that Caucasian males and Asian males tend to ask for further compensation. I, fortunately enough, happen to fall under both of those demographics. Meaning that, the company is expecting me to ask for more compensation and has thus altered their offer in anticipation. When I tried to push back with the recruiter for standard compensation levels that I found online, it seemed that the company would be unwilling to negotiate with a competing offer. Thus, six online assessments. I’m hoping to land one of the six to bring the offer up at the company who gave me the original offer.
Speaking of deadlines, it seems like one of those assessments will be expiring soon. I’m off to the races again!
