Staffan Malmgrens blogg

As previously reported, I’ve studied for a history exam. The examination was split in two parts, one written and one oral, and this wednesday I did the last part.

I’m happy to report that I passed the test with a “MVG” grade. That’s the highest possible grade for these kinds of test, although I don’t know how many percent achieve it. Neverthless, this was the last real obstacle in the way for a successful law school application, and so it’s a big load off my shoulders. Now I can spend way more time working on lagen.nu.

As part of my preparations, I summarized the entire history of the world in a 100+ page document. I was planning to put it up on the web under some suitable license, but it needs some polishing and some restructuring (right now it has the exact same structure as the book I read, Människan genom tiderna), which I’m not really inclined to do right now. However, if someone’s interested, drop me a mail.

As a part of my ongoing preparations to apply to law school next year, I’m currently studying the history of the world. In Sweden you can, if you find that your old school grades aren’t so good, do a general nationwide test for applying to the university – “Högskoleprovet”, and if you get a good score on that, you can use that instead of your old grades to apply for any university program.

Well, my old school grades weren’t that hot, and so I took the test some time ago, and it went really (really!) well. I might have gotten smarter in the last ten years. But then I discovered that in order to be a laywer, you need to be a history buff. Or at least, your old history grade must be at least 3, regardless of your Högskoleprov-score. Mine was a 2 (graded from 1-5, 5 is best). Oops. (This isn’t specific to law school and history, every university education can have some subjects for which applicants are required to have at least a 3 as their old school grade. This wasn’t a problem to me before since I’ve only read computer science, for which history is not considered that important.)

But there’s a second chance for people like me. We can re-read the high scool history curriculum and take a day-long test, and if we pass, then we still get to apply to law school. And so what I spend a lot of nights doing now is reading and re-reading history books at an increasingly frantic speed. The date for the test is Sept 13th, for which I have to be as historically versed as I’ll ever be (actually, there is another test the 8th of november that I can take, should I fail this, but I try to keep that possibility out of my mind for now).

Anyway, I’m finding that history is really an interesting subject, which really DOES help me to understand the present better. I wonder why I never liked it back in school? I guess it’s harder to see the use of it before getting interested in current affairs and in general seeing the world.

On another note, since I won’t be writing so much about programming anymore, I have been thinking about starting to write this blog in swedish instead, as it will be of even less interest to people outside Sweden now. Then again, if I’m going to link out to lots of people all over (and I will), it might be nice for them to know what I’m writing about. If I had put up a talkback system, all you trusty readers could weigh in with your options, but I’m a lazy lazy man.