Grades were posted for this past fall semester. I like to make a news post when I get them because not only do I forget about them down the line and it's a bitch navigating my school account to get to them, but so that I can write down how I felt about the particular courses for when I read it later on.

This semester I took six 3-credit courses (18 credits) so I was technically doing an overload of classes as far as the bursars office was concerned. It's odd, because at the school I transferred from their cutoff for needing permission from the school to ad more credits (and thus have to pay extra) was 21 credits. It was still a pretty difficult semester. 4 of the classes were upper level (300-400) and they required a lot of studying and writing. I think the last week of classes I wrote 4 or 5 papers.

Physical Geography: A-
This was one of only 2 lower level courses I took this semester and I was worried it would wind up being something I wouldn't do well in because it was out of my concentration and I had 5 other classes to worry about. In fact, I was getting steady Bs on his tests, but I made sure to do extra credit and even joined the Geography Club which the teacher was the adviser for. I wound up enjoying the class quite a bit even if it wasn't what I typically like learning about.

Surveying Themes in US History: B
I was a little disappointed in how I fared in this class, considering I took another US history related class last semester and got an A, but despite being a lower level class the teacher was pretty challenging. I didn't really take away much from the lectures or the tests because I didn't much care for the instructor's style. He spent a lot of time talking about the political leanings of each US President but wound up testing us on dates and events on the exams, so I was always a bit worried about what he'd throw at us. His tests also had really messed up formats where he'd have a giant list of some 30 events that needed to be matched with presidents who were under 5 separate lists corresponding with the letter choices on bubble sheets.

The British Empire: A
I enjoyed this class quite a bit. This being one of those upper level history classes, there was a lot of reading and writing to be done. My teacher was pretty hardcore about it all and I was taking two classes with her. I wound up surprising myself with how well I did on exams and quizzes because she would psyche me out before them talking about all the themes and events she expected us to cover in our essays (because she didn't even do multiple choice questions on her tests).

India & the World: A
Another history class with the British Empire teacher. This was the class I was most worried about. Although she expected a lot in the British Empire course, I was somewhat familiar with Britain and European history, but I had no knowledge about India prior to this class. The fact that the first week she had a reading assignment and I didn't even have my textbook yet made me feel like she'd hate me for the rest of the semester. After doing well on midterms in both the British Empire and India and the World, she wrote me an awesome letter of recommendation for law school.

Special Topic: WWI & the Peace 1914-1918: A-
Of all of the classes this semester, this was probably my favorite. The instructor was a retired professor who spoke French, German, Russian, Italian and god knows what else and was giving once-a-week classes on really specific topics. His syllabus stated that there were only 2 papers in the class and each was worth 50% of our grades. I got an A- on each paper. I was hoping to impress him on my second paper because I had recently learned how to use footnote citations in Chicago Style (the preferred citation method for historical periodicals) and even went to the school library and found some really old WWI atlases to supplement my research (which he was fine with only using the texts in the course and the movies we watched in class).

Health & Society: A-
This was a class that was pretty far out of my comfort zone as far as what I would have chosen, but I needed to get some gen-ed requirements plus an upper-level class in my department. It was a social work class, so I'll need to get some paper work to get it to count as both for me, but either way, I liked it too. The instructor was a guy who worked with the Clinton administration during the last attempt at reforming health care. He had a lot of interesting things to say about all that, but we didn't really go over the course material in lecture. Luckily he wrote some comprehensive study guides which saved my ass on his exams (all 2 of them). The research paper was a little crazy to do for me because I was used to doing research for legal or historical texts, not scientific ones. I was assigned a broad topic of the Swiss health care system and I decided to focus on how the reform in 1994 to their health system effected insurance companies, doctors and citizens. I wound up spending a few hours in the basement of the school library looking at microfiche (which is like microfilm). I was happy I got an A on the paper, because for that kind of effort I would have been pretty bummed to get anything less.

My semester GPA was 3.67 which brought my overall GPA to a 3.58 (From a 3.52)

Next step, update my transcript for law schools to look at.

Edit: For my winter course, Piecework for Peacework, I got an A-