First semester completed!

Well, my first semester as a Master's student is officially over! I've handed in all my papers and taken all my exams. Exams, I might add, are much nicer in the US in my opinion. Here they are worth a full 50% of your grade, and they consist of 2 essay questions to be completed in 2 hours. Not my idea of fun. But its over now!! Hurray!

Here is some British exam terminology, if you're interested:
revising: studying
invigilator: proctor
external examiner: the person who actually grades your exam (yep, not the professor)
marks: grades
bollocks: the exclamation you make when you realize that only one of the many topics you "revised" for the exam is on the exam (yes, this did happen to me, but I winged it and I think I did pretty well considering)

So what else have I been up to since my last (distant) blog entry? Well, Thanksgiving of course, but that will be in a separate entry. Other than that, mostly just writing papers, avoiding writing papers, "revising" for exams, and avoiding "revising" for exams. I really do have procrastination down to an art.

But for now, I have to go run to meet Brighid at our local fair trade coffee shop for some serious reading of a very serious book (crime/mystery: Black and Blue by Ian Rankin. I would highly recommend his books if you like mysteries and you want a flavor of Edinburgh, as all his novels are set here (and the main character likes to hang out at the bar across the street from my flat)).

Upcoming blog entries:

• Thanksgiving!
• Where did the sun go?
• What I plan to do with my 3 1/2 weeks of vacation besides sleep a lot :)