It’s good to be in the recovery phase now! Yet another unavoidable exercise of short term evaluation of long term learning has left me quite drained. Having managed the 1st semester exam of the Masters quite well, the 2nd battle would lack some elements of surprise. However it still required some doing.
I can best summarise the 2nd semester as 3 months of project, followed by 3 weeks of exams. Our struggles with the operating system and the copter during the project ate up most evenings and weekends, while the lectures remained the most popular show in town. The professors performed in the lecture halls, while we attended regularly, applauded and left. Nothing much transpired regarding those subjects in between the lectures. The huge reference books with fancy titles gathered the dust of my room over the semester. They only got the chance to challenge the strength of my shelf, rather than the capacity of my brain! Having to share my time between lectures, projects, assignments, part-time job, blogging, reading and travel, studying remained to be done 'tomorrow'. With only a couple of weeks till the exams, additional reading would be impractical, managing the lecture slides would be a feat in itself.
As the days finally ran out, the first paper said - “Ready or not, here I come!”. And we definitely didn't see it coming. 2 out of the 3 sections of the paper showed us stars on a bright Monday morning! The 'open book' luxury didn't help much as we ran out of books to open! With an out-of-syllabus question adding insult to injury, we left the lecture halls fuming out our frustration via colourful language in praise of our dear Professor! After this rough start, the next encounter was a 'closed book' one. We had all the variants this time, but most interesting were the 'partially open book' ones – only 2 handwritten sheets allowed. Although intended to save the students from unnecessary memorizing of formulae and facts, some chose to exploit the loop hole to avoid memorizing anything. They broke records with hilarious display of data compression of the complete curriculum onto the 2 sheets in micro-writing. I wonder how long it took them to find the answers in the labyrinth, if they did find at all.
These couple of weeks have been as challenging to the rest of my body, as it was to my brain. Exams tend to screw up my biological cycle by cutting off the nerves connecting my organs to my brain! Food and sleep are usually the dearest to me, except during the exams. The nights and the mornings before the exam days saw me struggling to force enough food down my almost shut food pipe to keep me from passing out during the 2 hours. As I struggled with the questions, my classmates could hear my stomach cry out for help, and yet my brain focused on the solutions. With the end of each exam, my brain became aware of the other emergencies in the body and I desperately crawled to the kitchen and made up for the previous meals and more! The time in bed the night before was usually a futile attempt at 'getting some sleep'. After endless rounds of tossing and turning, I would finally give up and just lie in Shavasana waiting for the alarm to ring.
The eve of the last paper was of the likes of Christmas eve! We counted down the hours and discussed our travel plans for the coming vacation. As the last race of my hands against those of the clock got under way, my silly smile grew wider by the minute and my lips ended up close to my ears by the end of it. With Salzburg, Berlin and Cologne waiting for our visit, it was just a matter of deciding which one first!
