bone in sub

tomorrow afternoon i have my last exam! assuming i pass everything, i’ll have this degree and be done with the hundreds of unpaid gigs and all the uneducational busy work. i have learned a lot, completely changed as a person/grown up, done a ton of fun things, and met some awesome folks, but i will be glad to be done, and have no intention of any further education anytime soon.

a couple things were especially cool in the last month: my final project for music recording was just “make an album, and write about the process”. that was it, open-ended. i recorded a classical harp album which i had a lot of fun doing, and for the writeup ended up writing about two pages on what i did, why, and what i thought of it. it was satisfying to write, and it took no time at all. this was in sharp contrast to the three research papers i wrote in the couple weeks preceding – writing about something i enjoy and know a lot about is GREAT. such a refreshing feeling after that crap.

speaking of research papers, one of my three non-performance classes posted the grades tonight. i turned it in one day late (10% off), had done it the night before, and it was two pages below the quota. i was pretty nervous about the grade. imagine my surprise when i see that i got a 78, AFTER the lateness penalty. that’s 25% of my grade and i got a similarly high mark on the midterm, i’m going to do well in that course!

the other unmusical courses are film and astronomy. the film exam i was SUPER worried about, because i hadn’t been to class or seen any of the movies since early january. i was expecting them to screen a few films and ask us to identify and discuss the segments, which i would have completely bombed, but there was NO screening whatsoever! i had never written for 3 hours straight, but that’s what the exam was. i smoked the two long essay questions (i think), so i feel like i did pretty well on that exam. last film exam i was petrified about and i got a high B, so that bodes well.

astronomy was amazing – every couple weeks i get on a big space kick, and spend a few hours reading about space. this combined with my good memory paid off well – in a class of 300 people, i was the first one out of the two hour exam. the proctor had to run and get the class roster for me to sign, and then read through my whole exam to make sure i didn’t actually skip a section. awesome. i felt great about that exam, and that doesn’t usually happen!