Wow, so my last blog entry was almost a whole month ago. Oops. Long story short, I had midterms after my Alps trip and kind of put off the blog…then I forgot about it. Now, one month later, I feel like an idiot. As a result, I will be posting four blogs in the next four days. So let’s get into what I’ve been doing for the past month.

Midterms, ugh. They are the worst, and I think I can say with confidence that nobody likes them. Taking midterms in Europe is a different experience than in America. To start off, only one of my tests had “short answers” and even then, they were paragraph long short answers. Every test was structured in an essay format. It wasn’t fun. The German test was difficult, but there weren’t too many surprises. One thing I noticed that was very different was the preparation leading up to the tests. A couple teachers gave us a paper that had the topics we should study. The other two (excluding German) didn’t tell the class anything really. For my history class, she gave us a timeline sheet of important dates and told us that we should just reread everything; also, not to worry about anything we learned on our excursions (nearly every Wednesday we go to a museum or landmark). It wasn’t much to go on. Now my psychoanalysis class, that was on a whole other level of non-preparation.  Not only had he not really given us much to take note on in class, but didn’t tell us anything that could be on the test. (There is a long winded reason for the lack of notes, but it will lead to me going into a very pleasant rant about the class. To be clear: Psychoanalysis class= nicht gut) Actually, we went on a trip to the Freud House museum, and he had mentioned that there would be a couple questions on the midterm about it. I guess he did technically give us a miniscule insight about a couple questions on the test. All in all, it was characteristic of how the class had been so far, but that still didn’t make it fair.

I have gotten my test results back for all classes. I did well enough on my tests, so I won’t complain (too much). Now that I know the finals are going to be set up the same as the midterms, I can better prepare for them. I unquestionably like the way we do midterms, and the preparation for them, better in the US than here. Granted, I do realize that it’s just a cultural difference and respect that.

Tomorrow’s blog: My trip to Amsterdam

Location: Vienna, Austria