Finishing Projects and Exams at UCT

In terms of school, the last few weeks have been very busy! I had a number of major projects that were due for my courses, two of which were based on research projects and included a presentation to the class on my findings. One was a group project, and the other I did solo.

For my African Studies course (Race, Culture and Identity in Post-apartheid South Africa), our group did the project on blogging! I started out in a different group, but actually switched when I saw how relevant this topic would be for me. In fact, I had already done most of the research on the specific topic that I wanted to explore, which is the state of social media, blogging, and web 2.0 in this country. I'm practicing it! We each used our own blogs as spring boards to the issue we were tackling, and I chose to do a case study on my blog post about Devil's Peak.

You'll notice that I have my most visited blog posts listed on the right sidebar of this page. My Devil's Peak post sits comfortably at the top, because once the mountain went up in flames I saw a marked increase in traffic to my site. There was lots of linking happening, or "Link Love!", and in some ways this blog became part of the South African online media. I was honored to have people stealing my photos, reposting them, and claiming that they took them! So this was the basis of my project. Since it counted for half of my large seminar course, the project alone was worth like 4.5 US university credits. Wowza!

The number of visits to this blog.

One of the slides from our presentation. Look familiar?

I did my other project for African Traditional Religion by myself. My research was to look for the role that music historically and presently plays in African religion, specifically within ritual, healing, initiation, and storytelling. This was probably one of the most interesting projects I've ever done, since I was able to hole up at UCT's music library looking through books and their vast CD collection. Since UCT is a very old university here in Southern Africa, there is a unique collection of recordings of tribal music from the 1950s and 60s, among other nuggets. I copied many of the CDs to my computer, so perhaps I'll share with you sometime. It was an awesome project, and I did well on the presentation and paper and all that.

Then, all my "production-based" work was finished. I had my last lecture at UCT on June 28th. The full week following that, or last week, we had off as time to study. I suspect that the university hopes we'll forget the material from class during this week. Yes, I realize that we're supposed to study, and legend has it that many people do... but let's be realistic. I did study, but this long amount of time only served to make me forget things. With exams being typically worth 40% of your final grade... you want to perform well.

We'll see how I did, but I finished both of them this week. And yes, I'm done with school for the summer finally! (Well, winter here.)

Stressing about exams.