My, what a difference a year makes! As the months till graduation tick down, my time horizon has seemed to grow. It's not clear whether that's a product of the hard limit of my knowledge approaching, or my lived experience increasing.
Either way, my dissatisfaction with past selves has risen dramatically as 2017 progressed. At this point, I can even admit that my behavior—while not necessarily unpredictable given those initial conditions—was the primary reason I failed so dramatically during my years at Purdue. Four years doesn't seem like a particularly long time, not nearly as long as it felt five years ago, during my first semester of university.
Motivating myself with the prospect of being done with it (no, not like that) is now a viable strategy. It never worked before, and I found those kinds of pep talks somewhere between frustrating and completely incomprehensible. When I wrote about hyperbolic discounting in education, I was just barely starting to react to that line of reasoning, after a semester of struggling to make myself work through a workload that, in retrospect, was pretty good. I probably wouldn't have believed it then, but I'm actually nostalgic for Dr. D's thermodynamics class. It's unclear, however, how much of that perception stems from the broader situation.
