The Ultimate Study Date

As of 3:46 on Friday, May 10th, I am officially done with 2 of my 5 classes! Yippee! And I am on my way to 2 more being done, too! :-) How, you may ask, have I been so productive? Well, I've had some awesome study partners!

On Wednesday afternoon, my host family loaded up the car and headed off to their summer house with Lars' whole family. Given that my exams started Friday, I stayed behind to watch the house and spend some quality time with Junior and Balou. I will describe some of my adventures with the dogs in my next post, but today in celebration of finishing my classes, I want to give credit where credit is due. Thanks to the support and focus of two of my lovely DIS friends, Anna and Becca, I managed to knock out a full paper and a half and study for my in class final (which I just finished an hour ago).

Yesterday early afternoon I met them at the train station and brought them back to Ejby. We set up in the dining room and got to work. There was some method to our madness that enabled us to be SUPER productive:

Becca (L) and Anna (R) hard at work

We employed a good old-fashioned technique that I developed with my friend Emily (from Dickinson). When she and I had late nights of work in our research lab, we devised a system that ensured we actually get work done rather than constantly interrupting each other to tell stories:

We set a timer on the computer for 45 minutes. During those 45 minutes there is no talking (which, if you know me, you know is not easy). If one of us suddenly remembers something we want to say, we'd write it down on a scrap of paper in the middle of the table and share at our break. Remarkably... it works!

a snapshot of my computer desktop with the timer in the front... you can see how many times I've set it in the past 48 hours

But during our breaks we did far more than just talk! 

...We took advantage of the beaaauuutiful day outside!

Anna is free as a bird on the trampoline

Becca is entertaining Junior 

Happy feet, dirty with mud and grime from playing like little kids

....We made dinner and danced around the kitchen to our favorite 90s songs!

Using my knife skills to chop onions for our homemade guacamole (thanks to cooking lessons from Evan)

 My favorite break-time activity was an 11pm Just Dance party, which we followed with ice cream.

...And as the night wore on, we cuddled with the dogs!

Balou took a special liking to Anna

I had a cute visitor wanting attention while I read

...Eventually though, we decided we needed to go to bed. We had a somewhat early morning in order for me to get into the city on time for my test. 

I'm now done with my Applied Psychotherapy class and my Service Learning Seminar! My Danish paper is complete (just needs to be proofread), and my Positive Psych paper is about 30% finished. Somehow, it's all getting done! Tonight, Becca and another friend (Cara) are coming over for dinner and studying. Hopefully we will be equally productive. 

Thanks to friends (and cute dogs), I'm finding ways to make my work manageable (and even a bit fun). We'll see how I hold up as I try to crank out 2 ten page papers in 48 hours.... more soon!