The Final Sprint

 - a look into the everyday life of a third term IB student

Text is further down, but first a few pictures.

We skyped a few weeks ago, our whole room from last year, and it was great. I really miss you all!

I've noticed that most of us (RCN:ers) have a tendency of posting pictures of campus when the weather is great. Most of the time, it looks like this.

After song writing, the sun was on its way down and everything looked blue. We took pictures.

On Friday we had bonfires and lit the lights in the trees on campus, as well as drank glögg (Nordic Christmas tradition). 

And, since no blog post is complete without it, here's a picture of the fjord looking extraordinary. (It's not visible, but there's snow on the mountains. Winter is coming.)

At some point last year, when I was still a young and carefree (...) first year student I wrote a post about what life here is like, and how days play out. I thought I'd be nice to do it again and spot the difference (clue - less social life and less sleep...)

6.30 My first alarm goes off. I wake up, not very happily, and slowly make my way out of bed, either reading before or studying for the test of that particular day.

7.10 Arrive at kantina, sit down at Sara's table, alternate studying with talking and having breakfast. It's the end of term now, so it's not until about 7.50 that majority of breakfast eaters start showing up...

8.00 Classes. Need I say more?

14.00 Back to the room, gather my things, off to the library. I spend the afternoon studying and going to the activities I'm signed up for, and take a nap when I have time for it. Before I came here I'd never sleep in the afternoon, but like Ro says "You don't need to go to Latin America to learn about siesta, it's enough that you come to RCN". 

17.30 Dinner, talking to people, enjoying a break from work.

18.15 Back to the library, finishing off whatever I have left to do that needs to be done this particular  day.

20.00 Ro and I go to the gym, and when it's open the pool afterwards. I think this is my favorite hours of the day, especially when I've actually finished my school work for the day. Which, admittedly, is not every day. 

22.00 On good days, watch an episode of Supernatural, or have tea. On not-so-good-days, study some more. Bed time whenever that's done.

Second year life/third term life is less UWC and more IB, which is sad in many ways but difficult to avoid. From what we've heard from our second years, things calm down a bit fourth term, since most of the big assignments have been handed in, SATs are done, universities are applied to and TOK is over, and I can only hope that it's true. I miss parts of first year life - spontaneous things, enjoying a day off without feeling bad about it, participating in every event that's going on. On the other hand, second year has its high lights too. This year we're closer as a year group, and more than ever does RCN feel like home.

Not that I'll be sad to see third term gone. 17 days left.

The problem with breaks...

...or why I'm more sleep deprived now than I was a week ago

Late nights watching Supernatural

November break started on Friday. The last block of the day, Maths, we were staring at the clock and just waiting for the minutes to disappear so we would finally be free for a week.

Now, free? I'm enjoying not having classes, but somehow I seem unable to remember in the evenings that I still want to get up early the next day. 

A typical day:

7.45 My alarm goes off. I stare at it, and decide that I deserve to sleep another hour. I'm unable to fall asleep, but stay in my bed for another hour anyway, doing absolutely nothing.

~9.00 Kantina time! I come to Sara's table, and since she's a more disciplined person than I am she's already been there for an hour. We drink more coffee than we should and pretend to study. Neither gets as much done as we planned on. (This is where I am right now, writing a blog post instead of studying for a Chemistry Exam - capital letters very much needed).

11.00 People start trickling in. We have brunch. We talk. We ignore the books at the table next to us (because there are so few people here that we can use a second one for eating, leaving our books spread out at the study table). We drink more coffee (interestingly enough, my coffee consumption has also increase with the break)

12.00ish By this time my computer runs out of battery, and I make my way back to my room, or more accurately my bed. I stare at my books for a moment, decide that I'm tired, and take a short nap followed by another hour of doing nothing in my bed. Followed by an hour of watching youtube videos and not thinking about work

15.00 Ro comes to my room. We watch Supernatural. The first episode finished, and we decide that we most definitely have time for another one.

17.30 Dinner time. I stay in kantina for the whole one and a half hour. At this point, I'm starting to get a bit stressed about what I should have done,but it doesn't stop me from sitting there and chatting to people.

19.00 Back to the room, and start writing. Since apparently the IB is not enough for me, I'm taking part in a November writing challenge this year too (click here to see what that's about) and my goal is to write at least 5k words every day. So far (this is the fourth day of the thing), I'm approaching 25k and insanity.

21.00 Break from writing, make evening snack, find someone to talk to. Stay away from my room for well over an hour. Then. another hour or so of writing.

23.00ish TV-series time! "Just one more" is the key phrase here and the main reason that:

01.00-02.00 Around this time, I go to bed, too late realizing that the next day I'll also want to wake up early.