Apparently all of the US is on spring break right now, as evidenced by a rush of tropical photographs appearing on my friends’ facebook pages. Here in Cambridge, the Easter vacation started two weeks ago, and lasts until the middle of April. There are exams coming up though, so a lot of people have chosen to stay for part of the vacation, taking advantage of the various libraries and the personal study space away from home.
The Cambridge schedule is a little unusual, so I’ll try to explain. There are two terms of lectures, Michaelmas (Oct-Dec) and Lent (Jan-Mar). The third term, Easter (Apr-Jun) is primarily exams, with a few lectures in some subjects and projects in Engineering. This means that for Engineers, exams are at the start of the Easter term, immediately preceded by….5 weeks of vacation! So “vacation” actually means “studying an entire year’s worth of material, deciphering that set of notes that didn’t really make sense back in November and was easier to ignore for a while, consolidating large piles of notes into smaller piles of notes that are less terrifying in size and more terrifying in information density, looking through past exams to see how scary they really are, and attempting to catch up on sleep, eating, haircuts, and anything else that has been neglected during the preceding 8 weeks.”
But that doesn’t start for another week, so in the meantime, my work is governed by what’s due each day, and when I have supervision. In another week, I’ll have to actually organise my time and decide how to tackle this studying.
The last time I had to study material from ~6 months earlier was for Advanced Placement exams, and I felt totally on top of that material all the way through the year (with the one exception of American History, but I don’t think any of us really knew what was going on in that class). This is an exciting new challenge, and one I hope to make the most of!
Adventures in Cambridge(s) 