The best Christmas gift isn't expensive jewellery. It's not a nice skiing vacation, or a new plasma TV. It's not even spending time with your family and those you love. No, the best Christmas gift is this: freedom.
We are done with our first semester. Done done done done done. This means that (except for the part-timers and the two people doing a European Masters) we are 1/3 of the way done with our masters. Wooooo!
The end of the semester was hectic. We got our marks back for the Production assignment (my partner and I got a B) and for the Editorial proofreading test (I got an 81%, which I was very pleased with until I realized the class high was an astounding 94%). That was the easy stuff. The non-easy stuff was the past two weeks.
Editorial: On Friday the 10th we had to hand in our group report, which made things busy for me as I was one of the two people in our group actually writing the report. We met up on Thursday night to go through everything as a group, make sure everyone agreed on everything. Then some of us met up again Friday morning to print off and hand in the report. (It cost us £17 to print and bind! But god did it look good.) Then we met up again on Sunday to work on our presentation. Met again Tuesday morning to run through the entire presentation a few times. Tuesday afternoon was the actual presentations, and I've got to say, they really surprised me. There were 12 groups, which meant plenty of chance for a cringe-worthy presentation, but there wasn't one. Everyone actually did a really good job, and I didn't feel embarrassed on anyone's behalf. On top of that, I'm very happy with my group's presentation. No idea when we'll hear about the marks though.
Production: We had a test on costing/estimating on Wednesday the 15th (it was originally scheduled for the 16th, but the class reps convinced Adrian to move it as the Publishing party was Wednesday night and this cleared the way for post-party hangovers). There was quite a bit of panic around the test, largely due to inconsistencies with how Adrian rounded numbers in the practice questions, but the test ended up being far easier than anyone expected. In fact, everyone passed the test and the class average was just over 95%. We haven't had our individual scores yet, but obviously no one is too worried about that.
Design: We had to hand in our BLADs (brief, layout, and design) on Friday the 17th. I didn't properly start mine until that Monday, which had me a bit worried as the general Facebook consensus seemed to be that BLADs were evil and people kept having to re-do them. Considering the fact that design is quite the opposite of my strong suit, this had me worried. But it actually went rather well, and I'm quite pleased with my sample pages, if not the BLAD itself (it looks ok, but I don't have the artistic eye to make it look great). This was the first year they had BLADs as the Design project, which explained some of the incredibly frustrating and vague answers/instructions we were given, but in the end I think it was a really good idea. As the name suggests, doing the BLAD gives you a really good (but reasonably-sized) idea of what goes into the design and layout of a book. It also gave a great insight into marketing materials, as that's exactly what a BLAD is. I'll post some images of my BLAD later on, to give an idea of exactly what it is.
Marketing: aka THE BEAST. I'm pretty damn sure it's safe to say that no one enjoyed the marketing assignment. As I've said in previous entries, that class was a LOT of work, and the assignment was no different. The assignment was to come up with a marketing plan (including budget, which we had to stick to) for one of four scenarios, all of which were non-fiction titles (my partner and I chose a print and digital journal about communications and media studies). It was a useful and informative assignment, but it was also a pain in the ass. It was due at 5 pm on the 22nd, and my partner and I submitted ours at about 2:15 am on the 22nd. I know several people submitted theirs 5-10 minutes before it was due, and several others submitted it several days early. We'll see how that goes, fingers crossed.
Work Experience: is DONE. Now I need to start looking for more. It was a good and informative placement, but it also reaffirmed by original thought, which was that journals are not something that appeal to me, personally.
So that's that. We're done with the semester. Classes resume something like 29th January (I should really find out exactly what that date is), and in the meantime we are freeeee. Well, mostly. We're supposed to come up with a proposal for a dissertation or major project and have that ready to hand in when classes start back up, but I already know what I want to do, so I'm not worried. But since I'm in Oxford for the next month and a half with nothing to do, I'm considering spending some quality time in the library doing some background reading.
