KK’s Blog

I just looked up my exam times, and they were actually up this time, so now I can schedule for my exams. Sort of scary now that I know, though I’ve wanted to know for a while. They’re spread out over three weeks, but of course, mine are sort of clustered, though I never have more than one in one day, so that’s good. The first four days, I have four exams. Then I have a break, then two days with two exams, then another break, and my last exam is on a Tuesday. So here’s the schedule, if you want to know:

May 19, Monday, 9:30 am: Macroeconomics

May 20, Tuesday, 9:30 am: Microeconomics

May 21, Wednesday, 9:30 am: International Relations

May 22, Thursday, 9:30 am: International Economics

May 27, Tuesday, 9:30 am: British Politics and Government since 1900

May 28, Wednesday, 2:30 pm: International Relations in the Era of the Cold War

June 3, Tuesday, 2:30 pm: Economics of Industry

So I guess I’m fine with my schedule. I’ll get the bulk of my exams over with at the very beginning. And I’m done with everything a couple days before the last exams. I’ll have exactly two weeks in England after I’m done with everything before I go home, though I may go visit Melissa in Italy for part of that time. My last exam is the one I already feel confident in, so I don’t know if it’s good that it’s last. I guess I’ll hopefully just do really, really well on that one, but it might have been better to have it earlier since I think I could have used the extra studying to more benefit in another subject, but oh well. I also wish all the exams were in the morning. I guess I’ll have some extra time to cram on the afternoon ones, but I’d rather just get them done in the morning. I think my brain works better in the morning too. Oh well. I have no say in this, so I’ll take it. It gives me more time to study up on my British politics.

By the way, I had the phone interview. I don’t think it went very well, but it’s harder to tell when I couldn’t see their facial expressions or anything. So I guess I just have to wait and see if I hear from them. I hate interviews, though. I’m so bad at them. I won’t go into the detail of this one, but maybe they liked me, or maybe my resume was good enough to get me further in the process.

I’ve been applying to quite a few jobs since February for when I come home because I would like to start working right away and start paying off my loans right away. But I haven’t had a whole lot of response. One job was already filled, one job said I didn’t meet their qualification requirements, and the other ones I can’t seem to get to respond to me…until today. One position I applied for was an energy analyst for this company, E. ON, which is based in Louisville, but it’s an international energy company, which also has a headquarters in Germany. They e-mailed me back a couple weeks ago to say they were interested and for me to respond by e-mail if I still was interested and then we would set up a phone call to talk more. So I e-mailed, didn’t hear anything, e-mailed again, didn’t hear anything, then called today. He said they were still organizing the phone screenings, but they would let me know and to call again if I hadn’t heard anything in 3 weeks.

But then a couple hours later, they called back and set up a time for them to call me. Which made me really happy, and then scared. Monday at 3:00, I’m talking to four men over the phone to see if they like me and want to do a real interview later, I guess. I’m not really sure what it will be like, but I would really like to get this job, I think, although it’s weird to think I’ll actually have a full-time job soon that isn’t just lasting 2 months like all my internships. They’re an energy company, but they have a lot of stuff about climate change and emissions standards, so I think it would be a good place to work. And the offices are downtown, so if I lived downtown, then I could just ride a bike/walk/take the bus and not have to buy a car. Then I can just pay off student loans and not worry about paying off a car too. So pray for me and hope they like me. I’m sending out some more applications, but I think this would be great if I could get it, so I hope I do.

I made it back with a few complications, but home safely. And right now I think I’m going to take a nap rather than write an entry about it.

Thesis

I just got back to Regent’s from handing in my thesis at the Exam Schools. I got five copies bound today. It cost 100 pounds. However, the binding wasn’t actually that expensive. It was the color pages. The binding was about 25 pounds, and the black and white pages printed out were about 20 pounds. And the color pages were 55 pounds to print. But I couldn’t do it all black and white because of my graphs, and none of the printers at Regent’s print color, so I couldn’t have even printed it myself. And it has to be on A4 paper, so it wouldn’t have worked to print it back home either. Oh well. It looks nice. And I can say I wrote all those 78 pages.

I thought if I turned it in, then I wouldn’t have to worry about it because it would be out of my hands. While it is out of my hands, I’m finding that I’m worrying about it even more. I’m afraid I made some stupid little mistakes. I’m afraid of how they’ll judge the word limit and that I might go over. I’m afraid I left something out when I turned it in. Not actually afraid that much about the content. I just wonder if those little things were messed up, and if I had taken the extra time that I had, I think I would have noticed them and been able to fix them. But I guess, it’s really only 1/8 of my final mark, so I have to stop spending time on it at some point and focus more on the other 7/8.

I did notice as I was turning it in that I had put on the cover page, “China’s joining the WTO” and I should have spelled out World Trade Organization before using the abbreviation. One of the most obvious things, considering it was on the front page, but I didn’t double-check that because how can you mess up a cover page, right? Oh well, hopefully that won’t matter. I guess I’ve just put so much time into it now that I want it to be perfect. Last night I was up late, with Kyle trying to help over the phone, trying to make the graphs less fuzzy. Word wouldn’t export into a PDF, which is what the printers wanted. But when I copied it into Pages, my other program, the graphs got even fuzzier. When I figured out how to make them less fuzzy, the labels on the horizontal axis overlapped so you couldn’t read them. But Kyle finally figured out that I could delete some of the labels, and it worked out. It looks much better than it would have from Word, so I’m glad I put the extra time in, but then I’m afraid that in the transferring from Word to Pages, I might have messed something up. And I tried to cut out some more words, and I’m afraid that something may not make sense anymore.

And lastly, I’m really worried that they’re going to think I can’t spell, if I used some words that are spelled differently here than in the US (eg, with a “z” instead of an “s”), but that’s just how I spell them, and even if I spell them the British way, Word automatically corrects it. And there was no way to really check that for sure, because I’m not even sure of all the words we spell differently. Anyway, everything in this thesis has taken so long, so I don’t want it to be wasted time because I messed up some little thing. I hope I didn’t. And I hope it gets a good mark. If nothing else, at least it looks pretty.

I had my last official meeting today for the term, last tutorial last night. So now I can just sit back and relax. I do still have to read through my thesis one more time and get it bound, but other than that, I’m done for the term. So wonderful. I sent one more e-mail to Mark about a paragraph, and he said it reads clearly, so just proofing from here on out. No more major changes on the thesis. And then it will be out of my hands. How crazy is that. Suke told me to put in a page for acknowledgments. Which I have no idea how to do that. And I assume they won’t include that in the word count. So I guess I do have to write those. And after adding in the paragraph, it’s 76 words over the limit, which Suke said shouldn’t matter, but I’m paranoid, so I think I’m still going to try to get it under. Won’t it be wonderful when my blog is no longer taken up by talk of my thesis? I think so. But anyway, I don’t think I’m going to do much else this weekend. I could put in a few more hours, but with no motivation, I probably won’t. Mark suggested I take a week off, so I’m going to, starting very soon.

I woke up early this morning, and have been going non-stop since then. I went to breakfast, took a shower, walked very quickly to the library to pick a book that was on hold, and then went to my tutorial at 10. That lasted until 12:15. Then I came back to Regents for lunch, and went to my next tutorial at 2, which lasted until 3:45. Then I went to the bank, where they have finally changed the signatories, so we can write checks for the boat club and start paying bills!! Only I have no time to go through all that yet. Now that I’ve gone through 2 2-hour tutorials (if you start from Thursday, this is my fourth tutorial since then, only one more this week!), I have to focus on my thesis. I have my final meeting for that tomorrow morning at 10. So I’ll work on that all night. I just hope I last that long. Then once I’m done with that, I have to look over stuff for my macro tutorial on Thursday, which I haven’t even started anything for. But once Thursday night rolls around, I will be sooooo happy. I think this is the first time this term when I’ve really been crunching for time. It’s so weird because previous terms, I had this panic/adrenaline rush at least once a week. It’s sort of nice to be back in this, but at the same time, I’m looking forward to when it’s all over in June. Okay, my blogging was my break. Now it’s time to get to work on that thesis.