There's only one more all nighter between me and a three week break! Hooray!
So my dearest father is always bugging me to write more about school (love you Dad!) so here's a summary of the paper's I've written for finals. See I do work here!
--An 8 page paper on the relationship between civil society and democratic consolidation using Turkey as a case study. (Sounds horrible, right? Political science is lurking around my course work like some horrible zombie that won't die)
--A syllabus for a pretend class on militarization in Modern Turkish history. Seventy pages of reading a night for my pretend students! Sorry pretend class!
--A 16 page paper for sociological theory on Robert E. Park, an urban sociologist part of the Chicago School, and Karl Marx. It's basic thesis is that Park problemitized the city, but failed to see that the capitalist system was the source of many of these problems. Basically it was a big "I love Marx" paper.
--The last one is a 15-20 page paper comparing laïcité in France and Turkey. I haven't finished this one yet, but I will tonight! I chose this topic because both France and Turkey have a strict secular system which would appear to allow for religious freedom because the government separates church and state. In reality both France and Turkey have problems with recognizing and giving equal rights to their religious minorities. My paper examines why laïcité creates problems for religious minorities when it should, on paper, give religious freedom to all. We'll see how this one goes! It's sort of turned into a paper on how laicite becomes part of the national identity of a country. We'll see. I've written a few pages.
Anyway, so there you have it, I do actually go to school and work while I'm here. Actually this whole last month has flown by because I've literally been in the library for the past 2 full weeks.
Well I'm off to the library to get this last paper out! Sorry if this post was boring, but my life has been these papers for the past two weeks. It's almost over! So close!
Sunday, January 22, 2012
Sunday, January 15, 2012
Finals
So I forgot I hate school.
Just kidding! Ha! I just hate finals. The reason I haven't been posting recently is because I had a 20 minute presentation last week, two 7-8 page papers due tomorrow, a 15-20 page paper due Friday, and a 15-20 page paper due Monday. Lucky me.
So I've moved into the library at METU which is really great if you love working in a sauna or passively aggressively staring at people who squeak their chairs too much. You can tell I'm loving finals here. The real problem is that finals at METU are TWO WEEKS (just to emphasize, TWO WEEKS!!) long. This means instead of one week of hell and papers and stress, at METU there's two weeks of hell and papers and stress. Seeing as I'm only just approaching the beginning of the second week, I'd say I'm managing, but I don't know how long that'll last.
In other news, I'm going to England when all this work is over! Yay!!! I'm visiting Pete and Amy and for those of you unacquainted with my family this is Brian's, my sister's husband, parents. Since Mer and Brian dated for almost a decade (not a joke, 8 years) I'd say I know them pretty well. They've been living in England for the past year because when their kids flew the college coop they decided to travel. Pete works as an engineer for something I'm not quite sure of in Derby and they live in Etwall Village. Guess what that means?! I'm going to a village! Hooray! It just tickles me that villages exist in England, it sounds so medieval. So I'll be visiting them for two weeks and speaking English to everyone and relaxing while enjoying the beautiful English countryside. I can't wait! I believe Amy also has some plans to do a trip to Canterbury (Yeah like that famous ancient book!) and then maybe do some other things in London. Good thing I just watched the entire two seasons of Downtown Abbey to prepare myself. Speaking of which everyone in their right mind should watch that amazing show. Its streaming free on Netflixs people, get on it! Also I'll be meeting up with Dan in London sometime to see him in his natural habitat. All I can hope for is that his regional accent comes out and he shows me things about the city I'd never know since he lived in London for 4 years.
Anyways that's about it for me. The last piece of news from here is that it snowed! It's so beautiful and makes campus look like a fairytale land. It's been snowing all day and its really thick. Apparently it should snow off and on all week. So lovely. Also when I was walking to the library with some friends we saw the campus wide snowball fight in Devrim stadium. AMAZING! There were definitely more than 100 students running around throwing snowballs like it was a real battlefield or something. Talk about the best way to get relieve some tension from all those hours in the library.
Here's a few pictures of the snowball fight below.
Outside my apartment.
A bajillon people.
Sebastian ready for a fight with Sibel and Caro trying to look tough.
Snoooow
The fight moved into the corner of the stadium. Hard to tell here but about 100 snowballs were being thrown here.
Caro's defeat by Sebastian.
Just kidding! Ha! I just hate finals. The reason I haven't been posting recently is because I had a 20 minute presentation last week, two 7-8 page papers due tomorrow, a 15-20 page paper due Friday, and a 15-20 page paper due Monday. Lucky me.
So I've moved into the library at METU which is really great if you love working in a sauna or passively aggressively staring at people who squeak their chairs too much. You can tell I'm loving finals here. The real problem is that finals at METU are TWO WEEKS (just to emphasize, TWO WEEKS!!) long. This means instead of one week of hell and papers and stress, at METU there's two weeks of hell and papers and stress. Seeing as I'm only just approaching the beginning of the second week, I'd say I'm managing, but I don't know how long that'll last.
In other news, I'm going to England when all this work is over! Yay!!! I'm visiting Pete and Amy and for those of you unacquainted with my family this is Brian's, my sister's husband, parents. Since Mer and Brian dated for almost a decade (not a joke, 8 years) I'd say I know them pretty well. They've been living in England for the past year because when their kids flew the college coop they decided to travel. Pete works as an engineer for something I'm not quite sure of in Derby and they live in Etwall Village. Guess what that means?! I'm going to a village! Hooray! It just tickles me that villages exist in England, it sounds so medieval. So I'll be visiting them for two weeks and speaking English to everyone and relaxing while enjoying the beautiful English countryside. I can't wait! I believe Amy also has some plans to do a trip to Canterbury (Yeah like that famous ancient book!) and then maybe do some other things in London. Good thing I just watched the entire two seasons of Downtown Abbey to prepare myself. Speaking of which everyone in their right mind should watch that amazing show. Its streaming free on Netflixs people, get on it! Also I'll be meeting up with Dan in London sometime to see him in his natural habitat. All I can hope for is that his regional accent comes out and he shows me things about the city I'd never know since he lived in London for 4 years.
Anyways that's about it for me. The last piece of news from here is that it snowed! It's so beautiful and makes campus look like a fairytale land. It's been snowing all day and its really thick. Apparently it should snow off and on all week. So lovely. Also when I was walking to the library with some friends we saw the campus wide snowball fight in Devrim stadium. AMAZING! There were definitely more than 100 students running around throwing snowballs like it was a real battlefield or something. Talk about the best way to get relieve some tension from all those hours in the library.
Here's a few pictures of the snowball fight below.
Outside my apartment.
A bajillon people.
Sebastian ready for a fight with Sibel and Caro trying to look tough.
Snoooow
The fight moved into the corner of the stadium. Hard to tell here but about 100 snowballs were being thrown here.
Caro's defeat by Sebastian.
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)