september

drowning in homework

justin scawful • 22 sep 2020

i'm amazed at how i've managed to survive through the tsunami of homework i've been sifting through. all my professors are assigning more work than i think they would usually in a traditional format because the class is online and they're trying to compensate for rampant cheating that i'm sure is going on. it's been a lot. turns out it wasn't 10 essays for that biology exam but 14 and i didn't realize that until the night it was due so i had to whip up 4 more essays last minute. it was pretty rough. i've got a physics exam tomorrow and i'm hoping it isn't too bad. i haven't spent as much time as i should doing practice problems but considering the first few chapters are pretty basic stuff (vectors, newtons laws, tension, friction) i'm not too worried even with the time limit. there's gonna be some conceptual questions and then practical word problems. calculus has started to really rev up in complexity with multiple forms of integration (parts, rational expressions, trigonometric, subtitution) which hasn't been hard but definitely takes a lot of time to learn and keep up with when solving problems. i've gotten to the point where my work ends up moving onto another sheet of paper because i fill up a whole page.

division bell

justin scawful • 10 sep 2020

quick turnaround for once on a new blog post. my last one is a little messy. i've been making an effort to meditate more often this month, since i slacked a lot over the summer. i'm still recovering from the brain fog that not meditating can give you. it's weird to think about the fact that i used to always live in that state of overthinking. once you've awaken to it and cleared your mind properly it's noticeable going back. it's similar to like when you stop eating junk food and start feeling a lot better physically. then you go back and down a bag of chips just to feel like shit afterwards. even though in the past it didn't affect you like that (or rather it did, but you didn't notice).

i've got a lot of school work to do, and it can be an overwhelming feeling. online school definitely isn't easy. i'd say i'm more motivated and capable in this environment than the average student but it's still quite difficult to keep up that motivation. i've done well so far in all my classes but i believe that the imposter syndrome is beginning to set in a bit. since they're all high level classes i've noticed myself having to change the way that i study and be even more proactive than i have in the past for school. physics was the most difficult for me to get started in, but a lot of the stuff i learned back in junior year is coming back to me now and i'm latching onto it better. crazy to think that was four years ago already. now it seems like biology is the source of a lot of anxiety. instead of a multiple choice essay we were assigned 10 essays to complete by next sunday the 20th and only half are going to be graded. so even if we're being conservative about the word count essay that's writing anywhere from 3000-6000 words for an exam. this is when i really woke up and realized i was in college. up until now shit was childs play. this? this is next level.

flash crash

justin scawful • 6 sep 2020

i've been getting really into trading these past couple weeks. it was about two months ago that i started getting involved and then less than a month ago i did my first option trade. at first i was doing pretty poorly but then i actually was starting to see some results and make some profit after a few losses. for the first three days this week i was up about 30% until the market went through a massive correction which really caught me off guard. my positions have been very bullish because of the state of the market and the all time highs we were reaching so i did not have the proper hedge strategy to deal with such a fast downturn. it was a very humbling experience since it taught me an awful lot about what others were doing to handle the moment. i'd like to rebalance my portfolio so i'm not over leveraged in calls and left with no cash in case of an event like this correction. i also want to get more long dated calls now that i've grown the size of the account more. initially i was just doing some weeklies and taking a gamble basically but i got caught up in that, got a couple wins, and then got blown the fuck out by this correction.