This Tuesday we took our first finance test. I have mixed feelings about the exam. On the one hand, I felt prepared going into the test; I did all of the homework, kept up well with the material in class, read the textbook, and reviewed relevant topics. On the other hand, hindsight is 20/20. There were a couple topics I should have given a thorough review of, yet I prioritized other information.

Timing was my biggest issue on the test. This seemed to be the case for the rest of the class as well. Graduate students tend to panic over exam performance, so there was a bit of an informal post-test stress gathering in the common area on the 4th floor. By the time I got to the free response, where I knew a great deal of material, I had such a small proportion of class remaining that it probably affected my answers.

I guess my greatest reservation was that I felt I had not been tested relative to the time spent on each topic. One particular topic that we had not reviewed in class took up at least 3 of 19 multiple choice questions, whereas a heavily calculation-based concept that we spent over a week on was minimally represented.

All in all, it reminded me of an Organic Chemistry test or certain parts of the MCAT. While my performance was personally disappointing, there are still 2 exams to go and my grade ended up a B once the rankings for the class were grouped. So not bad : )

Back when I was premed, there was this tendency for students to self-rank. We were applying to similar programs, taking all of the same classes and professors, and much of our work was competitive in nature. It was pretty stressful. You would get together for group work in Biochemistry, where a professor only allowed the top 12% of students to receive an A in a class of around 150 students, and someone would eventually cave and start asking how we all felt about that last exam. It would get uncomfortable, or even award some relief, when we confessed our grades to one another. Sometimes it made relationships better, sometimes worse.

In this program, I don’t get that vibe. My success does not detract from the success of another student. So far none of these professors seek to weed me out, or foster distrust among us (other than maybe some of those econ exercises where we essentially get to steal from one another in a virtual market, but I like those). Rather than being on two sides of tug of war, I feel like there is only one side. We’re all pulling this big weight, suffering through material together and helping each other learn. Sometimes we’re the student in the front, sometimes we’re the student in the back.

Ultimately, the struggle is internal. Many of us, myself included, desire to overachieve. It can make us hard on ourselves, which isn’t necessarily a bad thing. I mean, stress is a defense mechanism after all. We just have to remember that we are not pitted against each other anymore, just against ourselves. To me, the students in this program are not my competition, they are my resources to learn and grow (and some of them are kind of like my family).