Day 152: The Second Exam

On Thursday I had my second exam. It was the tough one I mentioned the other day—the Instrumental Analytical Chemistry exam. The exam started at 7:30 in the morning. Having an exam that early is such a pain. It meant I had to get up at least by 6 to do a final review. And to be able to wake up that early and still feel fresh, I had to go to bed at ten the night before. Of course, with the pre-exam nerves, I couldn’t sleep a wink. (I’ll stop with the anaphora now—I can see it’s not working out as well as I thought.)

I left the house at seven, and it was snowing like crazy. By the time I walked the short distance from my place to the bus stop (20 meters), I was completely covered in snow from head to toe. The exam was in the main lecture hall of the Faculty of Mathematics—a huge room, but a bit old-fashioned. José Antonio (my Spanish classmate) and I sat at the very top so the professor would spot us quickly. We had arranged with him that he would hand us the exam questions in English and that we would answer in English.

But the professor never came. Instead, a group of younger professors walked in. Before starting, they shouted across the room: “There are two students from Spain—where are you?” Everyone turned around, puzzled, looking for these two unknown intruders. And when they saw us raising our hands, waving like contestants in a beauty pageant jury, they seemed genuinely surprised—I’m not sure whether because we didn’t fit the “typical Spaniard” image (José Antonio is blond and I’m red-haired) or because they simply didn’t expect to see two Erasmus infiltrators among their students.

One of the professors came up and handed us the exam. And here’s where, for the first time, I witnessed a real gesture of goodwill, of genuine, disinterested help, from a German (it took 150 days—five months!—to see such a thing). Along with the German version of the exam, he gave us a stapled set of pages with the questions translated into Spanish, plus a note that said: “I hope these will serve as a guide. In any case, the official questions are the ones in German. Good luck.” What a thoughtful detail!

I don’t know who translated the questions into Spanish—the professor himself, or maybe one of his Spanish graduate students called Herr González. (The grammar was flawless, but the text was full of spelling mistakes.) Honestly, it threw me off a bit, because since I had to answer in English, having the questions in Spanish felt awkward—yet another language in the mix.

The questions themselves were straightforward: key concepts, nothing too tricky. (That actually made me reflect a bit—something I’ll write about in more detail in the coming days.) The real problem was the time. An hour and a half feels way too short to answer so many questions—16 in total—in English. Definitely not enough. I only managed to answer 10. Still, I think my answers were fairly solid, so I walked away with a good feeling. Later, though, I felt a bit frustrated, because the exam was actually easy and I could have done so much better.

Now I just have to wait for the results.

By the way, here’s a link to the page of this really kind and generous professor named Saltzer.