Finals

Finals arrived with a great abruptness. In the States, or at the very least in my home institution (though I am fairly certain this happens everywhere), the last day of classes is usually followed by a few days off before final exams begin. These are called "reading days." The first two days of reading days are often used to party and relax. This serves two purposes:

1) It allows students to unwind, de-stress, and catch up on much-needed sleep.
2) It gives a couple days to get partying out of your system so you can focus on the finals themselves.

But Turkey is different. Boğaziçi final exams continue for about three weeks (instead of the 7 days at Washington University in St. Louis), and the first day of exams immediately succeeds the last day of classes. Oh, and exams can happen on Saturdays.

This meant that my last day of classes (for which I actually had no classes, by sheer luck this particular week) was actually the day before my Turkish language final.

I spent most of the day procrastinating, but I ended up working a little bit and brushing up on the minuscule amount of Turkish I've picked up over the last few months.

On Friday, May 25, sufficiently unprepared, I threw myself into the 10am final.

A few weeks earlier (after technically having completed all but 5 pages of our Turkish book), we had a second test, if you include midterms, in Turkish. I go to the morning class, and after a full day of studying and stressing, and not learning much, we walked into a test that was sloppy, ill-conceived, and quite simplistic. Section 111.01 had learned A, studied A, and been tested on A a few days earlier. My section, 111.02, had 'learned' B (which is basically A with about 20 more pages that we sped through), studied B, and was tested on stuff that we had learned a few days into the semester. It was so simple, we admittedly were completely unprepared. Incidentally, Section 111.03 had, like us, 'learned' B, studied the simplistic first-days-Turkish (after word got out that our section had it so easy), and was tested on A, getting the same test that 111.01 had received.

Anyways, this Turkish final was nothing like that. It was way too hard -- well beyond anything we had done before or prepared for. And we only had an hour to complete it, not the full 3 hours that the test was scheduled for.

We all bombed it. All of us.

Recovering as quickly as possible from the disaster that was Turkish, I jumped right into writing a paper for Karanfil's philosophy class, for which the only prep I had done was the powerpoint presentation that I had prepared for class the week before. Using that as an outline, I pumped out an 8 page final paper in about 3 hours. Two classes down.

My next final was three days later, on Monday. It was Historiography, and I planned to go about preparing in the same way I did for the midterm. I spent the two days prior to the test skimming every reading for arguments and slants, marking down who said what, and about what (Author Z wrote about Y and thinks X about it), and compiling them into a word document. It's a historiography class, which means we were not expected to write about the actual events, but about the historical debate between scholars related to those events.

I finished this preparatory work at midnight on Sunday, whilst enjoying a nargile with Renee, a friend from NYC, at Turan Cafe, Isabelle and my favorite little hookah lounge/tavla center/italian pasta/homework place, located just down the hill when you take a right out of the Superdorm.

I got some decent sleep that night, and found my way to the exam, which was in a building on South Campus I hadn't been in since our crash-course Turkish lessons at the very start of the semester. On the wall outside the classroom graffiti was scribbled reading, "We love economics platonically." I sat in the back of the classroom, so I could stretch and fidget without being distracting. I finished the test with an hour or more to spare, and checked off one more class.

My last final was on Thursday, May 31. This was for my favorite class this semester, Alexander the Great and his Legacy. The final exam was in Anderson Hall (TB 310), a large lecture hall in the center of South Campus, and the same building that Historiography met on thursdays and where Karanfil's philosophy class met every week.

I was prepared for this one. Whilst preparing, I actually guessed exactly what questions my professor might ask. The test was two essays. Each essay had two prompts, and we could pick one. I got 4 for 4, so I was quite prepared. And I was out of the test with an hour to spare (3 hours is clearly too long for these finals!). An interesting side note, though: out of the 33 students enrolled in that class, the people who came to the final were the 8 or 10 foreign students, the two turkish students who went to every class, and 5 students that I had never seen before. Not once had they ever come to class, ever.

And there it was, around noon on May 31, 2012, I was done with a semester of school abroad.

Finals. Finally. Finished.

Fin.