[Day +25] Final exam

_QUOTE OF THE DAY:
“Most great things in life don’t happen by chance, they happen by choice. You never know what’s possible until you risk finding out.”

#MORNINFG (8 : 20)
25 days did pass like a blink of an eye (or maybe 10 dozen blinks) and today it really is the end.
Now it’s the homestretch – the final exam… And as it’s often the case for any given experience at 42, it’s unlike any other. And for the final exam, it’s both the last and the first: the last exam I will ever have to do as a part of the Piscine and the first ever 8h exam over the last 20 years of institutional learning experience. The single longest test I have had to pass so far in my life.
And as uncommon as the event is, the emotional aspect of it is far more uncustomary. Since 4 days now it’s been a crazy cocktail of emotions that didn’t quite mix well regardless of all my efforts to shake it off. And today it just got to the next to detonating point… It’s so weird that I can’t even put it in words. It’s the accumulated fatigue + informational saturation + emotional overload + excessive social load + relieve from the dropping pressure + emptiness of the end + …
But if there is one thing I did learn at 42 is that no matter what is going on around the only way to get to the end keep on going. And so for now I put on hold this weird music, stove the emotional coctail to the freezer and will get ready for the exam.
DAILY OBJECTIVES
_START DOING: 0 entries (the geeks for “no inspiration)
_KEEP ON DOING: 0 entries (the geeks for “no inspiration)
_STOP DOING: 0 entries (the geeks for “no inspiration)
#EVENING (22 : 07)
This is it. Goodbye Piscine 42.
No badge no more cantina-roof-terrace lunches and desperate vocal tantrums after the 3rd retry, no more insulting poetry addressed to the Moulinette and no more astonished swimmers eyes as a reaction at exit music…
No more 4h-nights and rm -rf ~ desktop screens, no more daily uber trips and no more morning posts with unrealistic objectives haha.
It’s been rollercoasterer of little joys and big wins, hudreds of fails and dozen of extatic “I-can-do-its”, coutless number of desesperating moments and big deal of self doubt and dissatscation, bunch of stupid mistakes and pile of epic fails, priceless moments of new friendships and uncountable number of amazing memories… All these in 4 short weeks: 297 hours, 25 lunches, 50 new amazing friends later I’m waking up to get to my favourite E2 one last time.
_OVERALL:
Overall I’m drained and exhausted and I feel like I have no more energy or learning capacity left. I just feel reaaally tired. And the weirdest part is that the tiredness is not physical, it’s not even mental as such but it’s rather a feeling of saturation and emotional drain… And even though I can’t really feel it right now I know that it’s also a feeling of satisfaction for having done this.
And I also know that I will keep on posting some of the thoughts in the upcoming days. Even though the Piscine is over, it did set in motion a very powerful inertial acceleration that will keep my head worked up for a while even post Piscine. And it might take dozen more paragraphs to transition back to the normal world and usual schedule.
As for today, I will share with you one last daily log about the 8h exam.
_WORKTIME: 12h
_TOPIC:
FINAL EXAM
Hands down the most exhaustive and longest exam I have had to pass so far. 8h… I did hang on for 7 hours, of which was productive for the better half of it. Wasn’t it for the lack of chocolate (that I have been ripped off as it failed “authorised-dry-snack” test) it might have been 6h of the productive work. Anyway, even 4h of productive one-to-one computer coding session is a big enough achievement to my eyes.
I was one step away from another 42’s classics “failing to launch the exam”… To start with I did pick a sit in the wrong part of the cluster (when you enter the room before the exam the surveyance crew indicted which section you have to sit in “right – middle – left”). I guess I had a selective listening when entered the room and I have heard middle. And I was really happy to find all my usual e2 neighbours in there. Even thought we are not allowed to talk it is comforting to be sitting next to the people you spent almost a month with, shoulder to shoulder. So I was comfortably installed next to Jack, Gab, Clement, Victor and Andrei, with my keyboard cleaned and session ready to go except that I wasn’t… 2 minutes before the start one of the exam crew members told me that I was supposed to sit in the left and not the middle section…
So I had to delog, change the place, relog and launch the session.
Being quite destressed by this sudden change of plan I got the first place I found and hurried to log in. I did manage to change the place and launch the session but when I tried to start the exam I was greeted by a server bug… I did retry it for at least 15 times and it kept on saying that was a problem with the session launch and the staff suggested to change the computer. This solution would be perfect except for 2 things: first it takes time and second when you log and delog to many time over a given period the system bugs even more… So 2 minutes before the launch deadline I was still struggling and jumping between 2 computers with none working… And surprisingly enough I did manage to keep the high level of critical thinking. I have quickly realised that running 2 parallel sessions with my login won’t help the situation and I followed the strategy that one of my best friends always taught me: “When you are already half way through it’s still better to stick to a bad plan than to come up with a new one “. So I did log out from the second (well, 3rd already) computer and went back to the session I have started. I kept on retrying to launch the exam and exactly 1 min before the deadline I have finally got it working! Yoohoo!
BUT there was a but… Once the panic wave settled down and I started to navigate thought the files I have realised that the right flesh button of my keyboard was weirding out… Turn out it was detached from the keyboard and function in the free-electron mode…  So I just had to put up with the fact that one of the main navigation keys with keep on jumping off its spot for the next 7h 58 minutes… As if there weren’t enough challenges already. And having just come out of a struggle of changing places I didn’t want to take a risk to switch sessions again and changing keyboarded was, unfortunately, impossible… On the positive note, the staff found it very amusing. And I figured that it’s very consistent with overall experience
So there were the first 10 minutes of my exam. And brefore you ask, no, I’m not going to go that much into detail for the rest haha. Afterwards it was the usual stuff – exercice, git push, grademe. It wouldn’t have been fun though if I didn’t have yet another 42’s classics “exam-git-push-bug”. And so for my 2nd exercise it did bug and thus I lost 5 points to the systhem bug even though I did double check the to follow all the submit steps before grading the task. And since that I did replace the double check by the triple check and at least this part didn’t cost me any more points. And I also realised that even the final exam is a place to learn and improve. And I have discovered that there is a way to git clone on the exam (which I though wasn’t possible).
Anyway, at the end of the day it was 7hours, 14 exercices, 4 levels, 26 points and the first passed exam (that is the last one in the piscine)
_RESULTS:
Even though I have officially passed the minimum validation score for this final exam I’m far behind the objective that I set for myself. And thought I’m not comletely satisfied with the final result I’m still happy to see that I did progress from one exam to the next. It was 22 and the level 3 for the ex01, 22 and the level 4 for the ex02 and 26 and a first validated exam for the final one. And what is more important is the confidence I had in my own code and the sense of control I had overall. And even thought it’s a bare minimum I still have this last “PASS” for the latest and the biggest task. And with this I did pass over the level 5 threshold finished this Piscine with Level 6 – 23%.
And traditional bottom line looks like this:
 
FINAL EXAM – 26% – PASSED
DAY 13 – NOT STARTED 
DAY 12 – NOT STARTED
DAY11 – IN PROGRESS – 2/18 
DAY10 – 60% – 2xPASSED
DAY08 – 100% – 1xPASSED
RUSH02 – SUBMITTED – TO BE CORRECTED TUE
EXAM02 – 22% – (Level 3) – FAILED
EXAM01 – 22% – (Level 2) – FAILED
D09 – 10% – 1xFAILED
D08 – IN PROGRESS
D07 – 60% – 3xPASSED
MATCH-N-MATCH – 63% – PASSED
D06 – 100% – 2xPASSED
D05 – 64% – 3xPASSED
D04 – 85% – 1xPASSED
RUSH00 – 120% 
SASTANTUA – 0% – NOT SUBMITTED 
EXAM00 – 0% – FAILED TO LAUNCH.
D03 – 72% – 1xPASSED
D02 – 80% – 3xPASSED
D01 – 65% – 1xPASSED 
D00 – 75% – 4xPASSED 
WEIRD GREEN LINE (OVERALL PROGRESS) – LEVEL 6 – 23% 
_HIGHTLIGTS:
_CHALLENGES: 0 entries (the geeks’ for “no inspiration”)
_SPECIAL COMMENTS: 0 entries (system maintenance, check again later/the geeks for “no inspiration”)

2 Replies to “[Day +25] Final exam”

  1. Pourquoi ce blog est en anglais?

    1. Ekaterina Geta says: Reply

      Parce que il est en anglais 😉

      Il y a becp de resources en Francais sur l’ecole 42, que tu peux trouver facilement sur google. Celui la est à destination de la publique anglophone 😉

Leave a comment