Poor Sergey

UC Davis is quite an annoying institution. It came to my attention several weeks ago that our spring break starts this Thursday, and goes through the following Wednesday. How awful! Not only does this cheat us out of an extra weekend, but it totally screws everything up for me to coordinate going home with my sister since UCSB is a normal, respectable school (at least in terms of scheduling).

So I hunted down Sergey, my Evolution professor, to see if he'd let me take the final early, thereby allowing me to spend my sister's spring break (half of my final's week, half of my spring break) in Georgia. Sergey's a great guy. He's really nice. I've had so many problems this quarter, and he's always been more than happy to accommodate me. Like when I asked for an extension for a problem set... He offered to let me postpone as many assignments as I wanted, including the midterm. Or when the course website stubbornly refused to work from my home computer (it still refuses to, actually)... He suggested that I use a computer in his lab to complete an assignment. Didn't have to, since my own lab is chock full of computers, but if I were an undergraduate, that would have been extremely helpful.

Likewise, he was very willing to let me take the final early. Seemed excited to have someone take it early, actually. He said that I would be the "lame duck" (he's Russian, so I think that's analogous to guinnea pig) to see if the exam was an appropriate length and difficulty. I hastened to warn him that I would be in no way representative of the class (an introductory undergraduate course I'm forced to take under duress), and should be a pretty bad guinnea pig. I had to explain to him that I was a grad student (for which he congratulated me), a smart one (supposedly... I went to Stanford), and that I'm a fast test taker besides. He decided that if the exam took me an hour and a half to complete (exam periods here are 2 hours), it would be just right.

So I took the final on Thursday. Poor Sergey. He kept coming in to check on me, and it was obvious that he mostly wanted to see how far I'd gotten. And each time, you could tell that it disconcerted him how quickly I was going. It took me nearly an hour, and that's only after I actually checked through my answers so that it would take longer. I tried pretty hard to convince Sergey that the exam was appropriate for the rest of the class, however. I would hate for everyone else to suffer through a long final, just because I was the guinnea pig. I did, however, offer to let him ask me a few more questions if he wanted to. He chose not to =).

So now I'm done with Winter quarter! And tomorrow evening I'm taking the red eye home =P. (From Oakland, since it was really hard to change my plane reservations to this week to match Jenny. But now I'll have used all the major airports of Northern California! And just a tip: a surefire way to get off hold quickly and actually connect to a customer's service representative is to decide to use your time on hold efficiently and go to the bathroom =D).