Working Hard (Trying To)

Thanks for your patience and keeping checking – there’s not really much happening. Being stuck on the campus and currently drowned in writing papers and assignments, I have no other option than to write a little bit more about the school again. So what’s new? All the midterms are already over and the outcomes are more or less positive.

I have just one really bad story worth mentioning. I had a presentation on Thurs and as usually, I was finishing its preparation at the very last moment. But unfortunately I couldn’t find my flash disc and finding it took me about 5 extra minutes. But I didn’t really have these 5 minutes at all. So I had to run all the way to school, came 2 minutes late and went almost right away presenting. The problem was that I was still catching up my breath and couldn’t almost speak because of dry throat. Fortunately it ended up by success, I was only taken marks off because I didn’t fit into time limit – I made the presentation a little bit longer than expected. But I was really glad because I could give a speech about our beloved Czech Crown and it was a pleasure for me :-). If you’re interested, the ppt slides are here but that’s just a rough frame and doesn’t make sense without the talks.

I thought you might be interested in how does that all work here. There are really a lot of things worth mentioning but I can hardly be presenting the materials we hand in. Almost all of that is group work. But I decided to post following material to enable you to get little better insight.
For example in one of the courses, there are 2 exams, 2 assignments and one term paper. One assignment is about 8 pages document but in addition, you need to hand in group workplan before and individual assessment after the assignment is handed in.
It all takes a lot of time. We found it kind of hard to fulfill all the requirements. When you look at the document, you can compare both the questions and answers. We were really struggling to answer those questions. The answers we came up with sound actually like a lot of meaningless bulls**t. What a surprise when we got the grades. This workplan was graded full mark (but it’s just a small portion of the total grade). We experience a lot of fun in our Korean-Swedish-Czech team – the only purely international team I’m on. Well and I need to mention that this assignment, workplan and journal make all together ONLY 10% of the final grade in this course.

Regarding exams, all the exams had both multiple choice part (which is fulfilled to machine readable forms) and long answer part. I was surprised that we actually get the long answer part back once it is graded. So I’m posting front of one exam booklet to let you have idea how does it look like. I think it’s nice to have rules quite clear and unified. Of course I've removed all the personal info.

Btw. I forgot to mention my new roommate before. He’s studying geophysical engineering (it is very popular major here because a lot of oil companies are based in Calgary) and he’s from Yemen. Quite cool guy so far.

And finally, one totally off topic twaddle. I’ve promised myself that I won’t be ventilating my thoughts here but… When I got yesterday last issue of the Economist I was surprised what I found on inside back cover - advert encouraging to do business in Macedonia. Simply advertisement for the country – and they are selling themselves for really reasonable prices and under favorable conditions. E.g. they offer “abundant and competitive labor with €370/month salary”, tons of tax incentives, company registration in 4 hours. Isn’t that weird? Just wondering how will this competition for investors spreading out in Europe end up (in China anyway:-)).

Drum Circle - it was fun:-)