April has been glorious.
At the beginning of the month we had easter. There is nothing quite like snowboarding in the french alps for easter Sunday. I took a 2 hr bus to the Isola 2000 and it was even snowing when we got to the slopes. That was amazing and I only wish I had gone a few more times earlier because that was probably the last good weekend of snow on those slopes and it was so close to where I live! ?
The Monday after easter we had a belated easter lunch at the Australians apartment and everybody brought food(I made sandwiches). I was so sore from snowboarding I couldn’t move a muscle. I had my French final that Wednesday. I can honestly say I did not learn anything from my very sweet yet terrible french teacher. All I remember him saying (more than once) was, “Karlee, French is not accounting, there are not ruuuules when you learn a language you just have to practice” -.- Yes there are rules. There are rules in every language sir and I have to actually learn them in order to speak correctly. So frustrating. He also was not quite understanding what it meant to be in the BEGINNING?level french. Because our tests had content on it that not only had we not learned yet, but it was also the same things the intermediate level french class was being tested on.
Well enough about that. That weekend we worked on the Final for our International Corporate Finance and Governance course. It was rough. I had to spend the majority of my time trying to figure out how to do a DCF Valuation because on all the other case studies we had only one person in the group knew how to do it and instead of teaching the rest of us he just went ahead and did it while we worked on the conceptual questions. So its safe to say I did not allocate my time as well as I would have liked and my final product wasn’t so great, BUT I did teach two other people how to do the DCF. ?Unfortunately I had to use time I could have been working on my questions to help them with theirs and in addition someone specifically told me not to do it in a powerpoint form and it was definitely supposed to be in a powerpoint. So my final copy was subpar but I was proud that I actually figured the valuation part out. Lets just hope I passed.
So the 3rd week in April I had one class on Monday and one lecture on Friday that wasn’t mandatory. This is how the weeks usually go, they were sporadic. I either had a full course load or more often I would have a few scattered classes leaving me four and five day weekends or mid-week breaks where I could travel. This time I wanted to go to florence. All my friends already had plans so Thursday night I book a train ticket and packed my bags. I caught a train at five in the morning and went to Italy for the weekend. I made friends at a hostel and I even went for a morning run in Florence. It was nice to take off on my own for the weekend, It was the best spur of the moment trip I think I’ve ever taken.
When I returned to Nice I had one class Monday, one class Tuesday, and then my elective Mergers and Acquistions from 9:30am to 12:30 and 2 to 6:30 on both Thursday and Friday. Talk about a long day, two days in a row. The other electives I took were three days in a row and about the same hours. Its dreadful but they give you a coffee break about every hour in a half then you break for lunch and come back.
April was amazing and it only gets better because our Spring Break starts at the end of April and is two weeks long!