Finals (Three) Week(s)

I can’t believe this term is starting to come to an end. It’s now been just over three months since I arrived here (confused) in late August. That means that I have just under a month left here, so I figured I’d sum up my plans for the remainder of my stay.

Believe it or not, classes have begun to end. One of my classes is completely finished—I took my final for it yesterday. One more will be all over after a group presentation next Monday. The third will end with a final examination on Thursday of revision week.

This week is actually the last week of instruction. My lectures have started ending one by one and I’ve harbored mixed feelings about my classes ending, but that’s for a later post. I still have two classes next Monday though, because the instructors wanted to make up for the fact that classes began on a Tuesday. I don’t mind; I’ll be here then.

This weekend will the first in a while that I’m not planning on going somewhere outside of Hong Kong. I’ve got work to do, with four more finals to study for a research paper due the end of revision week. It’ll be nice and quiet here.

After revision week though comes the official period for final examinations. Granted, I’ll only have three (as one’s already taken and the other two are likewise scheduled prematurely). Back at UCSD, finals take up one week. That week is appropriately named finals week, and occurs immediately after instruction stops. We have no revision week and little time to revise in between finals.

Here’s different. It’s partly to blame I suppose on it being on semesters rather than quarters here, but finals week is actually three weeks here. (Okay, in actuality it’s two, but it feels like three to me.)

If you remember from when I registered that we wouldn’t receive our timeslots and venues for finals until mid-November, that time has come. While I would have hoped for them to be grouped together, preferably at the start, they all turned out to be spread out. I have one on December 8, one on December 14, and one on December 18. I leave back for the States on the 21st.

In no way do I plan to use all those gaps for studying. I want to keep travelling! To this effect, I’m going to go to Nanjing from December 4th to the 8th. And in the other gaps, I’m still negotiating where to go and what to do. No worries though—it’ll be good.

Copyright © 2009 James Philip Jee
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