finish my degree

The final diploma thesis for my University degree in Germany is due in a week, so I’m trying to write more every day. I’m still at 51 pages, but would really like to get to 80 by the deadline.

I studied at the University of Adelaide for 9 months in 2003/2004, and now I finally did two oral exams here in Stuttgart to transfer some of the credits that I earned there. Last week I passed the exam for the lecture Introduction to Software Engineering, and then Distributed Systems today at 9am. Now I just need to fill out the paperwork for the credit transfer and have it signed by the different professors.

I passed the final exam for my minor subject (music theory) this week, with a good grade. Hooray for the professor who signed me up for the exam (along with 4 classmates). Without his pushing, we would probably still bumble about, for another semester or two.

The exam was split in 3 sessions. The first was a 5-hour composition test in the beginning of February where we had to notate a 12-tone motive from a sketch and then create a contrasting variation from it. The second part was the presentation of our software projects, and I got maximum points for my gestalt composition tool with plugins.

The third part was a 1-hour oral exam and consisted of 3 parts: a piano Sonata analysis with 2 hours preparation time (Beethoven E-Major), a grand analysis of a modern 12-tone piece (Mantra by Stockhausen for me), and another presentation on a topic at the intersection of music and computer science (I did Interactive Music).

I passed my oral exam with a B+ today. That is quite satisfying for only one week of exam preparation. My trick was to create a question and answer sheet (or 4 pages rather) from the transcripts that other students have made after their exams with the same professor.

By the way, the 2 hour written exam on March 22nd was also ok, I passed with a C after only 4 days of studying for both subjects, database systems and software reliability.

Got a B in my compiler construction exam on Monday. Next is a 2h written test on databases and reliable systems on the 22nd of March. Today I scheduled the exam in theoretical computer science for the 25th of April.