21:05 Sat.
30 Nov, 2013

Only 1 course left

Day 114 , 33 remain
Lulea , Sweden
-8 °C
Partly Cloudy
9:04 am
1:33 pm

Today and yesterday I finally received grades from the two courses I took in the first quarter. I’m not sure what took them so long, exactly 1 month, to correct our papers. It’s true that here professors correct exams and not assistants but still, there weren’t more than 20 people taking these courses.

As I said earlier exams weren’t that hard, here I think program is more “bolonian” than in Slovenia, here focus is on projects during quarter, exams are only worth around 40% of final grade (of course this differs from professor to professor). So yea I’ve passed both of them with flying colours 5/5. Though grade scaling is weird, 3 is lowest possible grade (except fail) and 5 is best. Even so translation of grades to % is something like this 5 => 90%, 90 > 4 >= 70, 70 > 3 >= 50.

Ah I almost forgot, despite me complaining about my project group we did really great. At end we scored second best. If I take in to account how much work we put in to it I think we were light years ahead of others, since I always had that feeling when you know you failed at something since we did minimum amount of work to pass.

Talking about grades I don’t remember if I said how Swedish exam went. I’ve passed it with grade 4, thus proving once and for all that I suck at languages and will avoid them from now on.

In the following week I’ve volunteered to help at a computer science (multimedia) conference that is held here at LTU. I’ve never been at science conference before so I’m quite excited how it will look. More on this in next few days.

21:20 Wed.
23 Oct, 2013

End of first quarter.

Day 76 , 71 remain
Lulea , Sweden
1 °C
Cloudy
7:50 am
4:39 pm

Even though I still don’t know exact date of departure, I’ve inevitably reached half of my incredible journey. So far it has been everything and more what I expected from this adventure.

Today I had my last course in this quarter. What does that mean? Well now I have an “examination week”, where we have exams from courses we have taken in previous quarter. Luckily the courses I’ve taken don’t have exams but so called “home exam”. This is supposed to be exam that you solve at home, though it’s more like a project than exam. In one course it’s about 5-6 pages long project where we have to plan something, basically the same as we were doing during classes. We have about 2 weeks to solve this one. At the other course exam will be published on 30th and we will have 5 hours to solve it. This one should be a bit more similar to “normal” exams with theoretical questions.

I’ll post more about this after examination period. In other news: Nothing new in the North. =) Last few days were bit warmer, sadly melting all the snow. The other day I went on a “ski” hill to get a view over sunset. It was around -6 or -8 when I was taking pictures, my hand (without glove for handling camera) almost froze. View was amazing, you can notice how much sun has moved from summer pictures at my arrival.

Sunset over snowy hill.
Sunset over snowy hill.
Panorama from the nearby hill
Panorama from the nearby hill