Back in the Northern Hemisphere – October 12

Hi Northern Hemisphere, I missed you. Did you miss me? Yeah didn’t think so. We should make over-under bets on how long I’ll stay this time around. I’ll start it at January 2010. Where in the world will I be?

I expected my welcome back to the Northern Hemisphere to be a bit…warmer. And drier. Seeing as we’re at the equator and all I wasn’t expecting gray stormy skies for as far as the eye can see (far) and the necessity of wearing pants and sweaters (which are all in the wash).

But I’d say that crossing the equator was the least eventful event in the past two days. Mostly because it’s been midterm season and between creative procrastinating, delirious remarks, and failing exams, exam season always produces quite interesting stories.

Well start chronologically.

• Due to the fact that I have been going to Global Studies and doing all the readings for all the classes throughout the term, I was excluded from the Dartmouth study group. Because that makes sense. In a fit of anger and frustration though, Cory and I made a bet that we would hook up if one of us scored a 100 on the exam. (Cory, by the way, really wants me to clarify our marriage plans. He wants to make sure that you understand we plan on getting married for the soul purpose of convenience…it has nothing to do with attraction. At all. In any way. None. Never.) Anyways…this was incentive enough for me to study all night long. Two questions in I knew I wasn’t going to get a 100. Disappointed that I lost my opportunity, I eagerly awaited for Cory to check his grade. 100. (Yes that’s right Cory, I’m telling the world that you’re a nerd.) But this was with a 4 point curve, so he says that it doesn’t count.
• Somewhere in the middle of studying for Global Studies and taking the exam, I had a case study due for one of my Econ classes. My strategy here was to just turn the bare bones of the case in and to spend the class doing some last minute studying for GS. (I really wanted that 100.) This worked out well enough – I participate pretty actively during other classes so my professor was nice enough to not call on me. But that was before he sent out the email after class: “Great job today, to those of you who chose to not set aside the time to study for your Global Studies exam. For those of you who did, your time was not wasted as such efforts, if continued, will raise the median of the class.” If anybody wants to explain this to me, please do. But otherwise, I’m pretty sure that it means…oops on my part.
• Then came my other Econ exam. I knew from the start that this would be a disaster. The format of the test was more like biology than economics. And there’s a reason I’m no longer pre-med. Anyways…my saving grace came in the lacking paper supply on the ship. Fun story: there are no Office Depots in the middle of the ocean. Better story: when SAS restocked their paper supplies in Cape Town they assumed that we would continue using just as much paper as we had up until that point in the voyage. They forgot to account for the fact that midterms = needing to print papers to turn in, review sheets to study from, and exams to hand out. So we ran out of paper day 1 into exam season. Rather than just putting the exam on the projector and having us write the answers on notebook paper, or printing out the exam on notebook paper (as everybody who has had to turn in papers has done) though, our professor had a panic attack and broke into the dean’s sacred and secret supply of printer paper. Economists lack creativity. Or something about how she demanded the paper badly enough to break rules to access the only supply? Does that work?

Okay…now I’m off to finish my bio paper analyzing the food I eat. Greattt.