26th February 2006 - Day 132

I wonder what I've been doing the whole day. It just slipped past without me realising it.

Maybe it's because I woke up at 1300 today.

Haven't done anything serious up till now. Read a few pages of the lab manual and decided that the experiments will not be easy.

What ever happened to the plan of studying for the exams next week?

Oh. It got chucked away as I was reading selected chapters of A Tramp Abroad by Mark Twain. Here's what he has to say about student life in Heidelberg.

One sees so many students abroad at all hours, that he presently begins to wonder if they ever have any working-hours. Some of them have, some of them haven't. Each can choose for himself whether he will work or play; for German university life is a very free life; it seems to have no restraints.

Apparently not the case now. All the people on the floor are busy preparing for their exams.

There is no actual break in between semesters. The so called vorlesungsfreie Zeit simply means that there's no lectures. But all the exams and labs occurs during this period. When one is just finished with his exams, he finds that the new semester is starting tomorrow!

Of course, that is a bit extreme. But it really did happen to some people on the floor here.

This is unlike the system back home where we get pushed through the semester, rushing through mid-terms, lab reports, projects, project presentations, and the finals. Then suddenly, it's the largely undisturbed holidays where we completely do nothing related to the university,except for internship attachments or some ongoing research.

No preference for either systems. Both are as good. The person just has to adapt himself to it and work things out.

Oh well. Easy to say. Getting down to it is another matter. Just look at how I've been spending the past few days lazing around.

So, to the dentist tomorrow.