The beginning of the road.
All the roads have a beginning and a purpose. As I said in part 1, the purpose is to spend a year in England studying a MSc degree in the university. Further goals will be defined once I get there.
Obviously, someone needs to have a rough idea about what he/she wants to study and which university is the first in his/her list. In my case, I'm thinking about an MSc degree in Aerodynamics in the University of Southampton. Apparently, it seems to be a good university and it has a good position in the World University Rankings, being the number 55 of the world for engineering topics (QS technical ranking). I know that it isn't the MIT but I think that it is not bad whatsoever. Although this kind of rankings are not the wholly truth, they're made following a set of criteria that make them to become a relevant reference.
The first step to do the things correctly is to do a research, therefore I searched over the internet for a time, I composed e-mails and I looked for opinions and critics from other people that had done similar projects and where they had eventually ended up.
Most English universities have a set of requirements in order to be eligible to study there. Among them there is one which is common everywhere, an English language certificate. (CAE, CPE, IELTS ...).
IELTS is an English exam similar to the American TOEFL. It isn't defined for a particular level but it tries to give you a score according to the level you showed in your test. So there isn't a pass mark actually. This test is divided in four parts: listening, reading, writing and speaking. The University of Southampton requires a global score of 6.5 with a minimum of 6.0 in each part.
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| Test sequence |
Therefore, with a clear "mission statement" (as space mission designers would say), I began to prepare for the IELTS. I spent a week preparing the exam by my own and recalling what I had learnt at ELC with Alex (my former teacher). Then I signed up for an IELTS training course at the British Council in Barcelona. The training course was superb, I would recommend it.
Before the test I thought that the reading and writing parts were the most potentially problematic parts because of the time available to do them. As the day before we did a mock speaking test I was completely sure that the speaking was not going to be a problem.
Finally I took the test in November 19th. First the listening, reading and writing without any breaks. Oh dear, it was perfect. Then I had to go to the British Council for the speaking part, and here the things went nasty. I entered the test room full of confidence since the day before I did a freakin' awesome speaking mock test, the test began and I found myself trying to speak about a topic which I had nothing to say about. Oh s**t!! In a speaking test I'm supposed to speak so I had to say something and I started to mess it up xxxDDD. At the beginning of part 2 I began to do small grammatical mistakes, which I noticed and I tried to fix them, and then everything went worse; incorrect verbal tenses and so on. I don't know if it was as bad as I'm describing it, we'll see.
To make things worse, it's not enough to have a good overall score since I need a minimum of 6.0 in each part, so every single part of the test is as important as the others. Thus, if I have brilliant scores in all the parts but a 5.5 in the speaking, I'm screwed and I would have to repeat the full test. Well, these are the rules of the game and I agreed with them.
Tomorrow I will know the scores and I could either be in cloud nine or in the deep hell. (Quite a bit exaggerated)
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