This week was pretty nuts. I had my big Brazil presentation on Monday and the Urban Studies one Wednesday. Brazil went well. We got to pick any topic and do a 15 minute presentation to the class about it... had to relate to brazil in some way. I chose sex tourism because 1- it relates to my interest in human trafficking and prostitution and 2- Brazil is a HUGE destination country for it. I enjoyed doing the research and found the whole thing to be pretty interesting. The presentation itself went really well. The class was quite amused that I, the quiet girl who sits in the corner, doesn't drink, doesn't party, the "good girl"... was doing a project on sex tourism. And I made it pretty entertaining with some "bad" jokes. Al in all... they were quite entertained.
After that was done, it was time to devote every hour between 12pm on monday and 2pm on wednesday to my urban studies project. It was a group semseter project. So theoretically, we should have started it like a month ago. But with the other 20+ page papers for that class and thanksgiving break... it just didn't happen. So, Saturday morning my group met at the library and spent the day doing all the research. We worked from 11am-5pm. Not too bad. Sunday, we met again at the library at 11am and started writing the paper. At 8pm, the boy in the group said he needed to leave. I said, okay, so when are you free to start working again tomorrow? And he goes, "I'm not. I have a really busy week and I can't work on it anymore" Blah. Well, you can imagine that the other girl and I did not take that very well. This project is 45% of our grade and includes a term paper and presentation. What did he mean, he couldn't work on it anymore?!
Well... long story short. He left us high and dry. Juliet and I ended up working nine more hours on Monday, and four more Tuesday before "he had time to join us". By that point, we had finished just about everything and just needed to rehearse the presentation. I thankfully, did not have to pull any all-nighters although I was up pretty late Sunday night, monday night and tuesday night. Ah well. Such is the life of a college student.
The presentation on Wednesday went as well as could be expected. Instead of a 20 minute presentation, it turned into 30 minutes but oh well. We've never known the criteria that the professor is grading us on... so hopefully staying within the time limit isn't part of it :) But when you write a 32 page research paper and spend 40 hours in 4 days working on it... you may as well just share all the info you've got!
Yesterday (Thursday), I was EXHAUSTED. I even got nine hours of sleep or so on Wednesday night, but I think all the stress of the week and staring at a computer screen for so many hours finally got to me. I honestly could hardly function yesterday. But I had no work to do so I was able to just crawl into my bed at 9:30, read until 10:30 and was soundly asleep soon after!
It's now Friday afternoon, classes are done for the semester, workstudy is done for the semester, and I have three (THREE!!) more things left to do before I go home! I have a paper for my Brazil class due Tuesday, and a spanish final and calc final on Thursday. Monday-Wednesday of next week is "reading week" and we have no classes and just "get" to study. It will be a nice break! I'm not too worried about my finals, I have some work I need to put into them but I feel pretty good about them overall. AND THEN I'M HOMEBOUND!
I leave Friday morning!! Woohoo! Can't wait to be home, with nothing to worry about, no homework to do and a kitchen at my disposal! I've seriously got a long list of stuff I want to bake :D
Yay! The end is in sight! But honestly, I've loved my first semester here. There were definitely moments where I felt like I was in over my head, couldn't handle the pressure and the work-load, and just didn't like being so far from home. But these last 3 weeks (albeit stressful) have been truely wonderful and as excited as I am to go home, I think I'm more excited to have a break from working so hard. It doesn't matter where I am... I just wanna watch a movie. Or read a book. Or work out for longer than 30 minutes.
But I'm getting the best of both worlds :) home AND no school work! It's going to be great!
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