Swiv's Idea of a University
Created | Updated Jun 19, 2003
Swiv's Idea of a University: Part XVI
Well, that's the end of my third year at university done and dusted. I came home a fortnight ago now, and results came out at the end of last week. Just one year left to go - during which I think I'm going to get very scared at the prospect of not having a job at the end of it all. Actually - that fear's started already as I'm 'passing the time' by putting together a CV and beginning to think seriously about post-university plans.
But first, the end of the last year. There was the joy of the Ancient History exam, in which we had to write two essays and either three short gobbets (commentaries on primary sources) or one long gobbet. I go straight to the essays and write them first, before doing the shorter passages. So I looked down the list - and there was approximately one essay, out of nine that I liked, on Sullan legislation. One, on Tiberius Gracchus, which I'd been hoping to write, was a discussion about the tribune possibly being a Hellenistic prince - something we'd never touched on and, in my case, never even thought about.
So instead I tackled 'What are the problems for historians when dealing with Marius?' And I got lost. Somewhere just after I'd made my one valuable point - 'There are problems with the sources'. About two-thirds of the way through I suddenly realised that I should have answered the question on Gaius Gracchus' legislation (which I had avoided because I thought it might be a good plan to not write two essays on legislation). I didn't have time to go back of course, so I wrapped it up as best I could and went on to the gobbets, which I thought went fairly swimmingly, and I had five minutes left at the end to read through my work and reassure myself that my Marius essay wasn't quite so terrible as I'd first feared (I'm sure it was still pretty bad though).
After that it turned into a pretty good day. I'd left the house at 9am in the morning for my exam and I returned home at 2am the next morning - unfortunately as sober as a judge. There was a period of near-drunkenness at about five in the afternoon (we'd all headed to the pub straight after the exam so this was five hours down the line) but I got over that when the scarily pink nachos arrived for mid-pub crawl munchies. The learned professor appeared in the mid-afternoon and was promptly attacked on the subject of the Tiberius Gracchus question, and replied with a shrug, a 'did we not talk about that?' and a round of drinks. The pub-crawl degenerated into a beach barbecue and a trip to the cinema to see 'Some Like it Hot' at the late night show.
After the 'being examined' came the 'cleaning' and the 'packing'. I spent one afternoon packing; there was a plan, but it soon ended up with books and clothes scattered over the small floor space. Eventually everything was in boxes, and I couldn't move inside my room - let alone clean it - until Dad arrived with the car to load it all up. So Clare and I moved onto cleaning the kitchen. Everything came out of the cupboards and into the sink; new glasses were bought to replace the broken ones; the fridge and oven were pulled out and cleaned around, heck even the ceiling got dusted. By Friday night the house was spick and span - well nearly - and I scarpered early on Saturday morning to make the 12-hour trip home, leaving the others to deal with the remaining food, handing over keys and so on with the landlords.
I have just one question to ask after all that - why is it that when you're on a 12 hour car journey from St Andrews to Cornwall the weather is positively glorious and you have to swelter in a non-air conditioned car and, when you get home to a lovely place where the beach is 20 minutes away, the sun doesn't come out properly for nearly two weeks? Since term finished I've been getting ready to go to Uganda for the summer, collecting up all the odds and ends and working out how few books I can safely get away with taking. Oh, and the results came out - a First for Ancient History and a high 2:1 for Modern History, so I'm really quite tickled.
