Just had set theory exam. This is the easiest course I do, and thankfully the exam was really easy too. Except that as per usual I didn’t really take advantage of that, and couldn’t do stuff, under pressure, that I know I can do. I get this course. I can do standard questions in it. Yet I just can’t think clearly about maths in time-limited conditions.

I also suffered from a problem which besets me when doing maths problems outside of exams: I find that if I can’t do something straight away, I drift off immediately, so that even in an exam I am literally just sitting there.

So I’m pleased to be leaving academic maths behind forever at 4pm tomorrow. I’m just not suited to it, it seems. It feels like I think less quickly in general since doing this degree: I used to be good at thinking on my feet but I think a loss of confidence—I’ve been telling myself I can’t do maths for three years, after all—has sapped that away. Maybe I’ll be able to get it back.

Tomorrow’s exam is on a course I do not understand. I’ve done what I expected to do though: aim for 30–40% in two of my maths exams, revise enough to aim for 60% in the other two (though the exams then didn’t go very well). So I can’t complain, and just have no idea at all whether I’ll have got a 2:1; sometimes I think I will have, sometimes I think I won’t. So time now to learn some more basic stuff for the exam tomorrow and see what happens and then stop thinking about it, and try not think myself unworthy of celebrating the end of exams with everyone else.