Finals...

This past week has been insane… it’s been such a long since I was a student, I forgot how this whole studying thing worked… finals are not fun!

First, I spent an entire day at the Sorbonne registering for my spring semester which runs through the end of May. Last semester, I took the program that included 20 hours/week of grammar courses, phonetics courses and optional conferences (literature, film, French civilization). I barely made it to my required classes (grammar/phonetics) let alone found the time to go to the conferences—it’s a shame, it seemed like they would have been the most interesting classes. But with my work schedule (and budding social life?), I don’t have time to take all of the classes offered so I wanted to switch to a 12 hour/week program which would save me a good deal of money, free up my schedule and not require me to wake up at 6am every morning to go to school. But there’s a silly requirement that a foreign student must be enrolled in 20 hours of courses per week in order to qualify for a French visa; so basically I’m paying extra for the privilege to remain in this country legally. Sweet.

Anyway, once that was out of the way, I had to study for my final. A 3 hour exam on all the things I was supposed to have learned this semester… too bad I didn’t start paying attention till the last week of class. So I spent the night before the test cramming until midnight with a couple classmates and teaching myself the difference between passé composé and imparfait. My final was on Saturday afternoon in a massive building on the outskirts of Paris. There were about 50 rooms in the building, with each room holding 300 students. 4 pages of vocab/grammer short answer questions; 1 dictation; 1 composition where you had to describe a person you like for 2 pages (yes, I wrote about B).

It was tough! Everyone walked out of the room totally shaken and unsure about how they did… 3 hours seemed like a long time at first but it wasn’t enough! There must have been about 5 questions that I left unanswered... oh well. Our results will be posted on February 7th. I have friends who have to pass the test in order to stay in the country… and if they fail, they owe their government (who paid for the program and their living expenses) about 5,000€. Thankfully, I don’t need to pass—enrolling at a school is just a cover to stay in the country and the Sorbonne is a nice, prestigious name to put on the resume when I start job hunting next year. Passing would be nice though!

(courtyard at the Sorbonne)