Exams are finally done!
I spent the past two weeks ignoring pretty much everything in my life except those exams… and they’re finally over! You can bet I had a lot of catching up to do. Emails — both personal and business, Twitter, TV shows, all that good stuff.
My first exam was Monday night – Organizational Change Theory and Design. If the midterm was any sign of how it was going to go, then I had a ton of reading to do! So I hunkered down for all of Sunday and Monday morning and afternoon and read everything over twice. 14 chapters about organizational change, development, culture, design: from mechanistic structures to organic, upward and downward flows of communication, product, geographic and market divisional structures, matrix and product-team structures… shall I go on? Monday at 7PM was the moment of truth for all that knowledge; I walked out of that exam having no sweet clue how I did. But I definitely did not have time to dwell, with Legal aspects of business on Tuesday at 7PM, I went home to bed in expectation of an early morning the next day.
I woke up at 7:30 Tuesday, went to school and re-read all about torts and the basics of contract law. Unfortunately I had been forsaking Law class in order to get my big end-of-term projects done, so I had missed most of the last two weeks of class! That meant something like 14 chapters of material yet to read that I was going to be tested on in this final. With the day drawing closer and closer to seven, I had only read 9 of the 14 remaining chapters, so I skimmed over the remaining 5 and decided to only fully read two of them: property law and mortgages. This was for three reasons – first I felt that they were the most applicable to business compared to the other chapters I had yet to read (about securities). Second, it was also something I hadn’t learned before – previous classes had covered the laws related to business entities (like sole proprietorship, partnerships, limited liability partnerships and corporations). Third, since my Dad talks to me every once in a while about some of the points about property law, I figured it would be worthwhile to know. That pretty much saved me for the exam, since there were enough questions about property law to give me seemingly good answers for all of them! I walked out of that one feeling pretty relieved that I had known what I was talking about and because I happened to guess the right chapters to really memorize.
Wednesday and Thursday thus became devoted to my last exam, Network Security, scheduled for Thursday at 7PM. Thursday was a particularly tough day, with the exam that very evening I still had half of the material to cover from IPSec VPNs (and IKE – the Internet Key Exchange) to WPA’s TKIP (Temporal Key Integrity Protocol) to SET and PGP to biometrics. That’s not even including everything on cryptography that I had studied the day before! So with lots to do I studied for part of the day on the 3rd floor of the CSB and the remainder in teaching lab three (“the boardroom” as I like to call it) with Maria, Natasha and some random dude from second year CS. I felt pretty good as 5PM was rolling around, but soon after I discovered that I really needed to re-skim over everything still to refresh my memory of the past day’s studies. Around half way to 6PM, I was not feeling so comfortable anymore. I think it was the quizzing skills of Natasha that really helped the most in those last couple of hours, so big thanks for that!
After my last exam I went home to see my mark for Organizational Change had already been posted (Professor Gudrun Curry is apparently one fast marker)! I was really dreading looking at that mark since it was the one exam that could have gone either way. With apprehension I logged on to BLS and discovered that I did very well indeed!
As I was speaking with my Mom via MSN, I was relayed some bad news. I can’t post it here in case someone in particular is reading this, as she has yet to hear the bad news. But, on the positive side, although my Mother refused to tell me specifically what it was, there was also really good news to be had! Through my masterful skills of reasoning I figured it out on my own, that very night, but it was confirmed today: I’m going to be an Uncle and will soon have a Brother in Law – congratulations Rachael! With all the good news at hand and my exams over, I figure at least the bad news came during a high point!
I have a busy few weeks ahead of me. I move out of my apartment of 5 years on the 30th and temporarily into my Dad’s place until I find a job. On the 6th of May I leave for Hungary where I finally get to see the other side of my roots (I was in Israel for my Bar Mitzvah)! Then I arrive back in Halifax on the 19th, just in time for convocation on the 20th. Hopefully by then I will have found a job! I’m not holding my breath for anything immediate, but I remain optimistic. In these times it may take longer than I once thought to find a decent job that makes good use of these often-brutal past 6 years of University.