Final semester

[history_PhD]

From my perusing of these fora, I gather that there are a lot of students who are also finishing undergraduate degrees. Since this is the beginning of the end, I was wondering how everyone's final semesters will be. Are they essentially stress free? Are you taking fun classes or are you taking the classes you have been putting off for almost 4 years? How do you feel about it being the end of such a formative life experience? Or, has it been mostly miserable, unless you are in classes you want to pursue at the gradate level?

For me, I am taking only 1 class that I am actually looking forward to. I have to take the others in order to finish my other major. It's going to be pretty busy, especially during February and March when I will not want to accomplish anything besides check the forums constantly. I am excited though; my undergraduate life has been a lot of fun, especially the semester that I just finished. I have really grown a lot as a student, and I finally know what I want to be when I grow up-- a question that was unanswerable a few years ago. Apparently I'm in a reflective mood and was hoping that others would join in. . . .

[Ludwig von Dracula]

When I finished my undergraduate in music education, I had a teaching job lined up for the fall. So instead of working a summer job, I took Latin classes for fun at university. I really enjoyed not feeling any kind of pressure--I already had my degree and the grades didn't matter a bit (although they did bump up my GPA by .01, which is good for the present situation of Ph.D. apps I guess!). I'd been singing Latin pieces in choir for 10 years and wanted to understand what the heck they were about. Can't say I remember much of it, but I did at least finally learn what the nominative, accusative, genitive and dative cases are. It was a really nice way to finish off my undergrad, especially considering I hadn't really enjoyed the education classes that had replaced all my fun, awesome music classes in the last two years.

This semester, though, I'll be frantically writing and re-writing my M.A. thesis in addition to studying for, likely failing, and hopefully eventually passing my German exam. Along with deciding between several fantastic grad school offers, like all of us (fingers crossed!).

[katerific]

I'm essentially done with all of my degree requirements, except for a senior thesis (I got everything out of the way as soon as possible). In the spring I'll be taking a mix of BS classes and upper division classes that aren't required but are certainly pertinent to my studies (including a grad class). All of these fall under the "fun" category for me I'm also taking advantage of the fact that I have a really flexible semester to take an art class and a cinema class.

Overall, I've enjoyed the classes I've taken as an undergraduate, but I'm really, really stoked about moving on to the next level.