Fluffy bunnies and sparkly rainbows!
A few hours ago I finished the oral component of my Master's exam...and all went well! I had three days between the five-hour closed-book written portion and the oral...plenty of time to be nervous. I was able to start the oral by presenting changes I wanted to make...nothing too major. I was pretty nervous about the text-dating portion and the literature essay questions, and I had dreamed up all these crazy scenarios in which my committee was thoroughly disappointed in my answers, but more or less the opposite happened. We went through the exam, they asked me some further questions, and mostly I didn't have any trouble answering them. My dating was a little off, but it didn't matter too much because my argumentation was pretty solid. My translations of the Old Norse texts went well, and I only made a few tiny mistakes in my Proto-Scandinavian to Common Scandinavian to East and West Scandinavian exercises.
On to the essays...my committee members said they were very impressed by my essay on language planning and cultivation in Sweden. That was my favorite question, and one I could have spent a lot more time on...language planning is so interesting. Even the ones I was more worried about went very smoothly, and we had a few fun discussions about things like immigrant dialects of Swedish.
Then they kicked me out of the room for a few minutes to discuss, and I was welcomed back in in a few minutes to congratulations and champagne. Then I met the new grad students, had a pizza party, and ran down to College Library to read frivolous things like Get Fuzzy and Why Do Men Have Nipples and other medical questions you'd only ask after three martinis. Tonight it's happy hour, followed by a weekend of not worrying and not reading un-fun things...and then back to studying! But how wonderful will it feel to be having manageable reading goals again? W00t.
On to the essays...my committee members said they were very impressed by my essay on language planning and cultivation in Sweden. That was my favorite question, and one I could have spent a lot more time on...language planning is so interesting. Even the ones I was more worried about went very smoothly, and we had a few fun discussions about things like immigrant dialects of Swedish.
Then they kicked me out of the room for a few minutes to discuss, and I was welcomed back in in a few minutes to congratulations and champagne. Then I met the new grad students, had a pizza party, and ran down to College Library to read frivolous things like Get Fuzzy and Why Do Men Have Nipples and other medical questions you'd only ask after three martinis. Tonight it's happy hour, followed by a weekend of not worrying and not reading un-fun things...and then back to studying! But how wonderful will it feel to be having manageable reading goals again? W00t.