Soon, I found myself in ever more difficult situations, including quite a few semesters where I was forced to take three physics classes simultaneously. I compare these years at the physics program to an extended MDLP. Once again, I bordered on the very edge of a psychological breakdown and had several experiences with flashes of light and very loud sounds within my head towards the end of the semester. Being conscious of their non-existence I found the experiences terrifying and disturbing. I was however, from my mass amounts of prior college experience, able to keep an even distribution of points on all of my classes, but I continued to receive a mix of Bs and Cs throughout these later semesters. However, I smile upon the fact that I was actually able to survive these classes. I will note that throughout these classes there was an extremely high rate of failure across all of the physics majors, and in one class in particular, the professor failed between 1/3 and 1/2 of the majors (mostly 1st year seniors). This in itself required me to face ever more students which were repeating the upper physics classes. Students who by this point had a lot more experience with the homework (they possibly still even had all the homework solutions). We also had three to four higher class ascended students who somehow managed to pull hundreds on every test in classes where 70%s were As (One of which, is a Goldwater Scholar, he entered Harvard and another other, Stanford). So in the end, I am happy to actually graduate among such incredible classmates just about two months after turning 20. (I graduate next week
)
There was another who was actually one year younger than me, and a member of the honors college at ASU, but this last year I witnessed first hand the devastating consequences of a psyche under such intense pressure, an effect which I myself had felt at the tip of my mind. This manifested itself when he just suddenly stopped coming to class, and failed across most if not all of his classes in a devastating drop in his academic career. The same effects continue to haunt him this semester as well… So as a result, I will be taking his place this graduation as the youngest graduate in my major. But to be truthful I wish that this was not the case, because we were good friends during our earlier academic experiences.
So what eventually happens to me… well I can only say what is going to happen in my future, to within a single semester of accuracy. The triple dream complete, I was actually expecting that the next stage in my life would come to me as naturally as the first in all honesty. Last summer, I gave my first shot at making my first publication with a 20 page mathematical research paper in which I attempted to “improveâ€