the past two months of frantically relearning a significant part of my undergrad curriculum is (hopefully) about to pay off – entrance exams take place the first half of next week.
monday is math day, with 3 hours of exam over a year and a half of math i have taken, as well as up to a year’s worth of math i learned the past month (because bioengineering is the math-lite engineering major). i’m feeling especially sketchy on 18.02 [vector calculus/multivariable calculus], mostly because surface integrals hate me. there’s also the advanced math section, which has fourier series, which i can never evaluate properly, even if i know how to do them, fourier transforms, which i kind of learned recently but can probably BS, and PDEs, which i probably picked up somewhere, but also didn’t really learn formally.
tuesday is the science section. there’s 8 sections, of which i can choose two. there’s fluid mechanics, which i had to relearn frantically over the past week or two, despite the fact that my research is on fluid mechanics. the other subject is electromagnetism, which is probably okay, though the guys in lab all act amazed when i tell them that that’s the subject i picked..
wednesday morning is an interview. despite reassurances from the lab that it’s only a couple of minutes long and not that bad, i feel like it’s going to somehow going to go horribly wrong. i got the impression that, for foreign master’s students, the interview is supposed to test one’s japanese as well as functioning as a normal interview (which japanese students wear a suit to). one of the guys in lab did say 「ステファニーのようにしゃべれる留学生はいないだろう」which made me feel a little better, but, you know, the lab doesn’t really get many gaijin who know any japanese.
when i’m not studying these days, i’ve been discovering 福山雅治 [fukuyama masaharu], who is pretty awesome. i heard this from several unrelated sources before i finally decided to youtube-stalk him. i only seem to like his recent songs, which are mostly emo-sounding ballads, but are still awesome.
- 想 – new love new world -: the video is awesome. and the song is probably my favorite at the moment because it has lines like 「原子レベルで遺伝子レベルで欲しがる進化のカギ 愛」which i look at and think “oh, genetics! evolution! i know these words!” but it’s a upbeat love song.
- 最愛: the video is related to the little prince? the song is pretty emo and the video is mostly him looking emo (on a spaceship?), but it’s okay.
- はつ恋: also emo, but more raw-painful-emo. it has an edge that the other emo songs don’t have – a “i can’t bear leaving the house because my heart has shattered into a million pieces” video.
- squall: the first time i heard this song, i swear i’d heard it before. i’m half convinced that someone sang this at karaoke once and i remembered the melody because it’s that good. also, he’s wearing glasses. <3 (also, i like to go around belting out parts of the song, like「もう隠せ～～ない ……… 叶えてほ～～しい」because those are the only parts i remember.)
