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Do you lack self-esteem? Want to feel really popular? Just bring a bag of nachos to a party. Thanks to Fernando, I was known as „Nacho Guy“ at Audrey’s birthday party on Saturday. We went to his new flat afterwards. Sadly, I promised not to write about the guy who danced with an ironing board. If someone asks, you did not hear this from me.

Last Monday Katharina arrived. She’s a friend of Frau Schmidt from Dresden. As she arrived two weeks after everyone else due to exams, I told her a bit about how the ITT works and helped her to find the right people to talk to. In the evening we went into town, where I introduced her to Isa and Chris. We just love Grand Canal Square after nightfall, so we went there together with Katharina. Well, she seemed to like it, too. Although there’s not really much to see and you won’t find it in a tourist guide, I think it’s really worth going there, because of the atmosphere. Difficult to describe, you better see for yourself.

Wednesday is salad day. Again we met at Carmen’s place. Chris and I prepared a superb salad: iceberg lettuce, cashew nuts, chicken breast fillet, feta cheese, cocktail tomatoes… anything your heart desires. I really could get used to having one proper meal per week. Even in the evening, when we went to the Captain Americas with the InCuSo and everyone ate as if he hadn’t seen any food for a whole week, I was still saturated. Yummi.

On Thursday we got all our exam results from the winter semester. Although my exam results were very much okay, I was a bit disappointed about some of them. In particular HRM, where I really wanted to get an A after all the effort I had put in the project. I asked my lecturer if he could give me some feedback on my exam to find out what went wrong.

Less than 24 hours later I met him in person. That’s really great service! He was extremely punctual („I don’t want to let a German wait.“), well-prepared and explained to me what he expected from his students (a lot) and made clear that most of my answers were rather good, but lacked details. I know exactly that I would have performed better in this respect if there was not the lack of preparation time due to the extraordinary circumstances. At least my English met his high standards. Still, I’m not too happy about the results. I really hope this semester’s exam timetable will be better.

Nevertheless, the weekend was great. Thibaut invited everyone to have a party in his house on Friday and I went to the Lemon with some friends on Saturday. Afterwards we said hello at Natalia and Manu’s birthday party in Tramway Court. Here’s a bunch of last week’s photos:

Last weekend was great! Yoann asked everyone to come to the Metro on Saturday, his birthday. Although one could already hear the bad 90s music from hundreds of metres distance, it was pretty cool. Almost everyone, who was already back in Tallaght, showed up and we really had a great time together. I haven’t had so much fun while going out in months.
The day after, Thomas, Chris and I were invited to come to Anna for dinner (yummi wraps!) and I helped her migrating all her data from her old laptop to her red, new Dell. Did I already mention that I could possibly start working right away as a customer service representative for them right away? I already helped and gave advice to so many people that configured and ordered Dell laptops over here that I would like to ask: „Where is my bonus, Mister Dell?“

Enter Examinations:
Wed, 12:30-14:30 Corporate Social Responsibility
Thu, 15:30-17:30 Management and Organisational Behaviour
Fri, 09:30-11:30 Human Resource Management
Fri, 12:30-14:30 Economics 1
Fri, 15:30-17:30 Software Development 5

„O horror, horror, horror! Tongue nor heart
Cannot conceive nor name thee!“
Macbeth, Act 2, Scene 3

Fortunately, this is last week’s exam time-table and not this week’s. This means: it’s already part of the past. Yay! Despite the circumstances, the exams went pretty well. Of course, I was not able to learn and prepare everything to the extent that I originally wanted to, but my instincts did not let me down and I correctly identified the most important aspects and learned them.

However, I am not very happy with the exam as well as my performance in Software Development. I do not know if it was just me, but there were way to many small syntax questions, where you could write everything in between two short sentences and a full-fledged thesis. Thus, time became an issue.
In my opinion, some of the questions were a bit stupid. If there are more searches than inserts, why would you keep things sorted by regularly sorting them instead of inserting at the right spot in the first place? And why the hell would you want to use a Bubblesort? Moreover, as often in class, there was a lack of sound object-orientation in the interfaces that had to be implemented as specified.
Of course, fatigue reared its ugly head after all these hours of examination and my performance (as well as my handwriting) went dooown. But I am not too worried: the examination only makes about half of the grade and the CAs and lab work hand-ups that make up the other one were almost perfect. More than 95% I think.

After this examination marathon, there is one more exam next Friday: Innovation and Entrepreneurship. I thought I deserve one or two days off now to recharge my batteries. So yesterday evening, Herr Doktor and I went to meet Tom at his place, where we chilled and played some games on the Xbox 360. Boy, it was good to see him again and I’m looking forward to tonight, because we’ll probably go out with some other guys that I haven’t really seen in a while (Chris!).

Thursday’s presentation in HRM went well: although Viorica and Oleg, who started, were a bit nervous, they could make their points and had a very good answer for the lecturer’s question afterwards. Immanuel was very confident. Before, he was a bit afraid, because of his English, but I think he did a great job.

Then it was my turn. I had rehearsed my part, the recommendations, for the whole morning and was well prepared. Although I certainly did not reach the level that I had during rehearsal, I think I presented very clearly and fluently. Thanks to Immanuel, who changed the slides for me, I could move and was able to address our audience directly, which I did with reference to the presentations of Monday and Wednesday.

Our presentation had to take no less than ten and no more than twelve minutes. How can we avoid unnecessary deductions without agreeing on some silly signal? My idea, using the timer of my mobile phone in silent mode, worked out pretty well. After about ten minutes, the vibration in my pocket reminded me that I was allowed to stop talking, but still had some time left to finish properly.

We received a lot of positive feedback from our lecturer, whom I would describe as very demanding, as well as from our fellow students. I think we might even get an A. For a group of four non-native speakers that would be a great success.

Satisfied with our performance we sat down to listen to the other presentations. I really have to tell you about the last one. In thirteen years of school and two years of university I did not came across something that even came close, but let me start telling you the story from the beginning on. Diesen Beitrag weiterlesen »

Here’s the reason why I could neither go with the InCuSo to Cork, nor to Kilkenny:

CAs. Lots of CAs. So I spent most of my time in my room writing. Grr! I left the realms of eustress far behind, but I have to admit that there were some good hours, too.

Maria, Daniel’s girlfriend visited him and we celebrated her 25th birthday on Thursday with a yummy chili con carne and Immanuel, Anna and Georg came to our house.
On Friday, Chris and I played some games of pool (even worse than the last time) and met Dr. Strangelove, Ismael and the Spanish girls at Tramway Court. In their apartment, we had a few drinks (Calimucho, börks) and played a funny Spanish party game, which involved a hooker, a killer, the killer’s colleague and a policemen before it got weird, because people started dancing and singing and Chris faked a striptease. No, it was not what you know probably think it was…
Yesterday, we met Tom and Natalie, who took the plane from Copenhagen again, and went to the cinema, where we watched Changeling, the new movie directed by Clint Eastwood. Afterwards, Chris and I went to his flat where we joined Alejandro and his girlfriend Jane (from Northern Ireland) as well as Carmen and her boyfriend Pedro (from Spain), who chilled in the living room. Jeez, Daniel was damn right when he referred to these days as „the couple days“!

Time is flying! This week will most certainly be very intensive as I not only have to prepare myself for the tests in Software Development and Innovation & Entrepreneurship, but also have to meet with my HRM group to compile a presentation on our project, practise it and finalise the project in corporate social responsibility, which became a bit chaotic due to strange requirements by a very ignorant person (not one my group members). On Friday, I’ll be through with all my CAs for this semester.

Next weekend there’ll be a day trip with the InCuSo, then my friend Flo (a.k.a. Idefix) will come over from Germany for some days, the day he leaves I’ll probably go to Galway with the InCuSo, on the 15th there’ll be a Christmas party and shortly thereafter I’ll be sitting in a RyanAir plane that is heading for Northern Germany.
In a blink of an eye my first semester at the ITT Dublin will be over. Wow!

I’d really like to take some more time to contemplate the last days as well as the coming ones and what this means for me, but I guess I should better go back to work.
In case you already forgot how I look like, because I was sitting in my cave all the time, here’s a recent (decent?) photo:

Today, we had to hand in our project in Human Resource Management, which had consumed the whole last week. I had to get up early, because I still had to go to reprographics centre in order to print it. This wasn’t too easy, because I spent all Sunday reading the MOB book to be prepared for today’s multiple choice test and stayed up late. And then there was another test in Economics.

It all went well: we were able to hand-in our HRM paper on time. Although I had only done two or three example exercises on Saturday, Economics wasn’t hard for me. Very logical stuff, I guess I’ll get about ninety percent. The MOB test was okay, too. Fifteen multiple choice questions and sixty minutes time. After about fifteen minutes I handed in my solutions and went with Immanuel to the Square where we rewarded ourselves for all the hard work with a nice Subway sandwich. Yummi! And it wasn’t even expensive, because I had some vouchers: two six inch subs and a medium Sprite for about 6,70 is a good price. Moreover, it’s tastier (and probably even healthier) than everything you can get in the ITT.
Talking about nutrition in the college: I should probably cut down my Starbuck’s cappucino consumption („A coffee a day keeps the detox away“). I currently spend way too much money in the mezz café.

So that’s three CAs, what about the half one? Tonight, I am going to meet Georg. I promised him to help him with his C++ project for his studies in Engineering. Maybe I should deny my original field of studies and tell everybody that I study Management in future… No, just kidding!