The beginning of an end

Hello everyone,
My final exams at SMU are around the corner. The first, and the worst, is already on Wednesday. I can’t say that I have been stressing about it too much. Actually, the fact of me being totally calm and relax about the finals is pretty weird. Of course I am spending hours in the library reading about hedge funds and interest rates, but I still find a lot of time to enjoy myself at some parties. I guess we, exchange students, have no choice. All of us are leaving right after the finals to do some traveling around South-East Asia, so now are the last moments to throw some “good-bye parties”. It is pretty funny, because in “My Events” on Facebook there are at least 4 invitations for “last party of the exchange”. All of them are in the week of finals. I guess you must be wondering why no one takes the exams seriously over here.
Well, I would not say no one does. The library is open 24/7 right now and it’s constantly full of the Asian students who basically moved in here. People eat, sleep and do all the basic activities in the library. That is one extreme. The second one is the exchange students who are partying all the time. The exams at SMU are, on average, worth only 30% of the grade. In that case, we do not see the reason to kill ourselves for extra 0.01 of the grade. Furthermore, most of the exchanges do not really care about the grade. For them it is only the matter of pass and fail. And from what we have heard it is extremely unlikely for a person to fail. It seems that the person may fail a subject only if he or she forgets to show up at the exam. It definitely sounds pretty good, especially if one takes into account that it is not so unusual to have a passing rate of 50% at UvT. Unfortunately my grades do count, but I have heard that the grades are being up-scaled so most of the students who are going for an exchange end up raising their average. So yes, another reason why tonight I am attending a Belgium Party instead of pulling an all-nighter in the library ;)

My exchange is coming to an end. It is over in exactly 10 days, therefore most likely this is my last post on this blog. I do hope you guys enjoyed reading it and if you have any questions about going for an exchange program or living in South-East Asia or traveling around here – feel free to ask. You can find me on fb or just send me an e-mail (j.o.stachowska@uvt.nl). I will do my best to help you.

See you around in Tilburg in a couple of months!