Well, the semester is wrapping up and with that comes (for the MA students in Madrid), the graduate student symposium. Basically it is a huge conference in which every student has to prepare a 15-20 minute presentation about his or her thesis up until that point in time. It was organized into three sessions over the course of five hours, with presentations going on in three different rooms during each session.
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| Before the presentations. Nah, not nervous at alllll. |
My presentation went pretty well. It was on the longer side, around 20 minutes, but after I started I wasn't nervous at all. All of the other presentations that I saw were really interesting. People are researching a really wide variety of topics, from linguistic topics such as Spanish versus English terms of endearment to cultural and literary topics like post-modernization and the Guggenheim museum in Bilbao. My project looks to compare the the language uses in Cataluña between the younger people who have grown up since the end of Francoism in the late 70s and the older generations of people who grew up before then. (For those who don't know, in Cataluña there are two co-official languages, Spanish and Catalan, although over the past 30 or so years the people and government of Cataluña has put forth a lot of efforts to try to make Catalan the more politically and culturally dominant language.)
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Brittany's a little rebel and was taking pictures during people's presentations. My advisor is the guy sitting there...I don't think he liked my presentation much because I read too much and didn't "improvisar." |
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| Brittany and me! |
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| Brittany and me with our mentor, José Pazó |
Anyway, now that that's all over, we have only one week of classes left! I have one 20 or so page paper to write and two exams to take, then it's just thesis from then on through the end of June. I can't believe how fast this year has gone by, but this semester has been really busy so I guess that speeds things up.
I'll be posting my pictures soon from my spring break travels with Chris (we went to London, Brussels, Amsterdam, Barcelona, and various places in and around Madrid). For now I need to go to sleep and start pondering that 20-page paper that I need to start tomorrow...
[Photo credits go to Kat and Brittany, as I was too lazy to pull out my stubborn, semi-broken camera and take some of my own.]
