Maths Rant

Rants about my love/hate relationship with Mathematics

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Exams, Burnout, and Finding Balance

August 11, 2025August 29, 2025 / Shub Das / 1 Comment

You can love a subject deeply and still feel like exams are destroying you. You can work hard, care a lot, and still walk out of an exam room feeling like you’ve failed. With A-Level Results Day just around the corner, I’ve been thinking a lot about how the pressure, the grades, and the system … Continue reading Exams, Burnout, and Finding Balance

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Every January, without fail, I write the date down wrong at least once. That’s expected. But what’s less expected is that my brain occasionally still wants December to be the tenth month. Which, objectively, it isn’t, but linguistically? It kind of is. There’s a claim about snowflakes that’s repeated so often it starts to feel axiomatic: no two are alike. It’s one of those facts that sits quietly in the back of your mind. You don’t question it. You just accept it, file it away, and move on. It’s getting to that time of the semester again, the part where your brain is somewhere between tired and trying its best, and every test paper starts to look the same. And sometimes, when I’m staring at an exam I’m meant to be focusing on, my mind wanders into questions that have nothing to do with the module I’m sitting. Showing up to lectures early comes with perks beyond just getting good seats. Most mornings on my way in to one of the lecture halls, I walk past one particular poster (attached at the end of this post) which captures the beautiful shifting image of particle collision. Until recently, I’d never really thought about how or why that happened, or that process even had a name: lenticular printing. Inevitably, it had to become one of my posts, and true to form, here’s my attempt at explaining it without it (hopefully!) sounding like a boring Physics textbook. It was around this time, three years ago, that I first heard the words “Paranormal Distribution” on a Teams call. Having wrapped up a morning of introductory lectures, I was at the student pub playing a game of darts with some of my friends and trying to remember how on earth the scoring in darts actually worked. Why 501? Why does it feel so hard to finish even when you’re close? And who decided that missing a triple 20 should land you in the dreaded 1 or 5? When doing Further Maths, I never really realised how much of that content would be actually applied. Like I remember learning hyperbolics and the cosh curve, but not as a useful catenary with all of its amazing applications. Last year, I was rejected from Oxford. No interview, just a flat-out rejection for Maths. Ever wondered why you sometimes get perfect signal in some random field in Wales but can’t even load a message while inside a lift? Or how you’re able to make an emergency call even when your phone says No Service? Or why your phone switches from 4G to 3G (or refuses to load anything at all) just when you need it most? And why does airplane mode exist?
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