- A receipt from Amazon for some books, bought to try and occupy my time from the aforementioned introspection
- NANA getting in touch. Definitely not my grandparent, as email from the deceased is something that even Bill Gates hasn’t been able to sell yet. I am glad to hear her sleep apnoea is being taken seriously by her doctor all the same.
- Woebot to say that episode three of Woebot TV is online
- Rapidshare registration code
- Adcom from A.N.Other School trying to tempt me into applying (verified as real and not a GMAT mailshot)
Needless to say, this is not exactly what I am looking to see. Though the question could easily be, “what am I expecting to see?” Time-zone wise, I am checking my email several times before it is even 7am in New York. Unless there are some serious vagaries in email, it will either be there when I check in the morning, or it won’t happen that day. I will report back in due course if such vagaries occur, obviously.
I have been quite good in that I have not looked at my essays since I sent them to A, 2 & Z. That is the one thing I have left alone. My GMAT bothers me slightly, but is by no means out of the realms of reason (well in the 80% for the schools). What I have thought long and hard about the differences between my University Education and that in the US. For those who don’t know, US schools have a glorious scheme called Grade Point Average (GPA) where all the courses are scored out of four, then, well, averaged by their weighting. For those of you who did know that, you may well be unaware that this doesn’t happen at all in the UK. Instead, in third year and (if applicable) fourth year, you get marked on honours courses and given an overall grade: First, 2:1, 2:2 (still known as a Desmond after the Archbishop) and, if you really did nothing in the time you were there, a third. This set of exams is commonly knows as finals, due to their dependency on single exams (this has leaned to involve some essay work for each course, but is still predominantly weighted to the one 2/3 hour exam).
What this means, of course, is you can arse about in years one and two, doing crazy courses like linguistics and Japanese, whilst filling your course requirements for your Physics masters degree. And no-one would care, so long as you passed, and then actually worked at the physics bit later on – it is all about those magic numbers. At least, noone until you engaged with a school across the Atlantic. Suddenly the pre-dereliction to study Applied Maths, which you were crap at, is brought under question. The answer that it was purely to get out of doing a math for economics course at 9am for a year, well, doesn’t shine quite as bright as it did in the mind of the eighteen-year old you.
Schools A & Z now proudly boast a letter on this very topic attached to my file, due to levels of paranoia beyond all reason on my part. In providing grades to School Z, in the weirdest turn of events, I was given me an option. Either I converted my grades to a proxy of GPA, or I posted them my transcripts. Best, was being told to do “whatever you find more convenient”. Well, let me see - £6.28 on Airsure and £1.09 on a “Do Not Bend” envelope, or the best part of a day proxying a mark-scheme. I was in the post office like a shot. Having pieces of paper emblazoned with a degree mark much superior to the comparable GPA is surely the way forward. To make it pure genius, it was accompanied with a letter conveying how, had I had known of GPA, I wouldn’t have spent my first years at University exploring the finer points of drinking cheap lager whilst singing Charles & Edie or Freddie Fender songs. This was the early days of what became known as Wyattingwhere a group of friends would spend the evening in the union, avoiding study, and putting intolerable music on repeat coupled with a lot of singing. Just rather that filling the bar with some avant garde, Msrs Charles & Edie were our weapon of choice.
Would I lie to you, school Z? To be perfectly honest, no I wouldn’t. I would have worked harder in those years had I known the impact it would have on such things. But hell, just please accept that this is the way we do things back on the little Island.
Onto other events. Today it took me twice as long to get the office compared to normal – a smattering of snow seemed to be all that was required to bring chaos to the underground. Yes, snow = delays on the underground, mostly as a result of the fact that the underground is, in part, overground. Fortunately with a fully stocked ipod, the journey horrendous delays and cramped conditions were near tolerable, and I actually arrived to work late without realising. That, reader, is the wonder of James Murphy’s forthcoming album. London, I love you, but you are bringing me down. Soon all the crap weather and busy period will be over, and I can get back on my bike.
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