Strike, French and good news

One of the professors who are not on strike is Philip and his French lessons which I attend every Wednesday thus continue uninterrupted. The School of Languages at Queen Mary offers language courses of Arabic, German, Chinese, Japanese and French for the whole year for student-friendly prices. I am glad that I have taken up this opportunity. Although two hours a week are, to my mind, not enough to become fluent in a foreign language, I think that I am making progress. One day, I would like to read The Stranger or The Little Prince in French, but a long road lies ahead of me in this respect.  After reading week, I have to do a five-minute presentation on a chosen French personality. I am slightly anxious as my ability to speak French fluently is limited, to put it mildly.

With respect to master's studies, I have received the best gift before Christmas in the form of an offer to study public international law at my dream university. The offer is conditional though and requires an average of 65% or above from my upcoming exams which is equivalent to the mark of B plus according to the marking system at Queen Mary. I, therefore, expect this year’s exam preparation to be more stressful than in previous years because my results have to reach a certain threshold so that I can commence my master's studies from September onwards. On the other hand, it is a certain form of motivation which gives me the energy to study when I feel exhausted.

As I have already mentioned in previous blogs, one of the ways I use to take a break from studying is literature. Studying law entails a lot of reading, and I was afraid that my relationship with books would inevitably suffer because of that, but books continue to play the same role in my life. Recently, I read Little Women, an innocent book in which you can find many important life lessons. Currently, I am reading Cloud Atlas, which is unique because of its composition and the variety of individual stories connected by the plot of the book.