Well this morning has officially gone down in history. I was peacefully sleeping at 9:05am when my I heard my cell phone ringing. David and I scrambled to answer it because for some unknown reason my phone allows me to receive calls but not make them, which makes calling people back very difficult to do. Luckily David was successful in finding my phone and handed it to me. I answered, expecting to hear some sort of automated message. But no. It was a secretary from the economics and law department at the university informing me that my European Economics professor was waiting on my arrival for my oral exam this morning. Bearing in mind that this was all in French and I had been awake for about 45 seconds, I was kind of dumbfounded, and then I replied that I was certain that my exam was a written exam and it was Friday afternoon. Anyway she said that she wasn't sure what to tell me but my professor had told her that he would wait for me until 9:30 but after that he was going to leave the campus. I told her I would make it to campus in about 15 minutes (the campus is about a 15 minute walk away), she told me the room number and I set off in a hurry to throw on some clothes and get out the door.
Relevant detail to the story: my economics course was a very interesting but incredibly complex and higher level (3rd year) economics class that was based on economic principles but studied the laws and changes at a European level, making the course very interesting, as I said, but also very difficult. Though I had enjoyed the class, I was actually considering not going to the final on Friday because I figured there was no way in the world I could know all the laws and implications of European economic proceedings and pass the exam. Besides, I wasn't going to receive any applicable transfer credit back at Miami. Therefore (this is the important part) I had not begun studying. So here I was racing out the front door to my oral exam on a subject that I had not even reviewed a single second for! Joy and rapture.
I ran up the mountain (138 stairs to the main campus, but then it is about 60 more to get to the building I was in at the top of campus) and arrived in the classroom at 9:25. That makes 20 minutes to go from sleeping to in a classroom, probably setting some kind of record. I deeply apologized for being late, though I did also express my confusion concerning the type of exam and the date... he informed me that I was supposed to have a choice between the oral today or the written exam Friday (do not even begin to ask me when this choice was supposed to be made known to me because I have no clue and I did not even see a stupid post-it note telling me about it) and said that I could still make the choice. Had I known about this choice earlier, the response would have been easy: the oral exam. I have a much better chance of better explaining myself and I can argue my points, and the professor can ask me questions at the end. But given the no-study circumstances I wasn't sure. Either way, in the end I figured I got out of bed and ran to campus for this test, and I always do well on oral exams, so I opted to just take the exam. He gave me my question and I had 20 minutes to prepare for 20 minutes of argumentation.
I actually spent most of my 20 minutes just trying to remember the topics from the course and then relate them to the question he had asked me, which seemed to add some substance to my response... After all, 20 minutes is a fairly long time to talk, especially in a foreign language. At the end though I gave my answer, argued it well, and with the questions at the end my "argumentation" was about 45 minutes long, because he really liked my perspective. I am quite sure that I passed the class. Anyway, I just figured you would all want to hear about my whirlwind of a morning. Only in France could that ever happen.
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