I've been thinking about going to a university to get a master's degree. I have the opportunity to do so for free. In my country, you can get free education for every education degree level, and I only have a bachelor's degree. There's nothing stopping you from changing your major, but you have to pass an entrance exam. If you got your bachelor's degree in the same major, there won't be any issues — you'll probably know everything you need to pass an exam, but if you're changing majors — that's another story.

I have a bachelor's degree in math and I want to get into a linguistic university to get a degree in foreign languages. I looked up what an entrance exam contains, and it seemed easy: you have to write a summary of a Russian article in a foreign language. I didn't think that should be too hard. I mean, I have some experience writing in English. But then I looked at the example of an article...

It's insane! The article they gave as an example is on a linguistic topic. It's about loanwords in Russian. In that article, there's a lot of examples of old Russian words with Slavic roots that are no longer used, and their counterparts with foreign roots. I wanted to pull my hair out looking at those examples. How am I supposed to write a summary of that article? I can't use any of the examples. It makes no sense. My only hope is that there'll be a variety of articles on different topics, and I'll luck out and get an easy one.

Not only that, but I thought the exam was purely written. Apparently, it's oral. You have half an hour to prepare, and then you have to give a five-minute oral presentation. Now I'm not sure if there's even any chance of me passing.

Well, I have until early August to get my duckies in a row. Maybe I'll figure it out by then.