It's The Final Countdown! (LOL not that song by Europe, but you know, final exams)

This is what my desktop has been looking like recently:

Completely covered in journal articles and maps of malaria and HIV prevalences, changes in land use, etc. It's now the last week of the semester, and we're officially within finals week. This year we've been graced with three reading days. Reading days are class/exam-free days just before several days of exams. They're commitment-free and allow everyone to catch up on their studying and write papers and presentations. Last fall (the most recent semester I was at Clark) we didn't have any reading days. It was a nightmare.

But this year we have reading days! Luckily for me, I only have one sit-down exam on Thursday the 16th. That means I have almost an entire week to wrap up a paper and a poster for Ecology of Infectious Diseases, write and complete a project proposal term paper for my directed research, and compose a bunch of cheat sheet notes for my open note/book test in Population Genetics.
The nice thing about open book tests is not having to study as hard for the exam. However, I find that in making all of my cheat sheets, I never have to use them anyway because I know the material so well after writing the notes out. It's a tricky way for professors to get the responsible students to study thoroughly and then be able to give out a trickier exam!

I'm almost done with my paper on malaria in Africa. I'm writing a paper on how the future projections for climate change to affect malaria are vastly under appreciated, due to complications presented by co-existing infections of HIV and changes in land use (i.e. forest removal) that are speeding up the process for mosquito vector expansion. The paper will certainly be 15-20 pages long at least ("pages" in college terms are similar to high school terms, meaning double-spaced and what not). I hope to have time to make the paper look all fancy and professional, as I take particular pride in my science work. Once I am done with all of my projects, I will post them here for you all to see what science work at the college level can look like!