Sometimes I miss university.

Especially when I find e-mails like this in my uni inbox:

I hope you were excited that Spain got to the World Cup Finals at long last!  I saw the last part of the game in the dentist's chair--missed some of the action since the dentist's hand was in front of the screen, but saw the winning goal.  Anyway, I hope that your preparations for Barcelona are proceeding well.  Stay in touch.  It was great having you in class this past semester!

That's from the prof I had last year at this time for my International Studies seminar class (I graduated with a major in IS; originally started as a minor, but got bumped up to a major two weeks before graduation) and History of Yugoslavia, which I took for extra credits that I was missing.  They were two of my favorite classes from my entire university career (which lasted five years), and the prof helped.

I wrote my IS final paper on nationalism in Spain, focusing on the Basque and Catalan movements.  The prof was actually going to be teaching a class on nationalism the next semester (she's an expert on the former Yugoslavia) and told me that she was fascinated and impressed with my paper because she didn't know much about the movements in Spain (she knew they existed, but not to the depths that I explained), mostly because of the complexities of Spanish history and the language itself.  I have a feeling she may have used my paper when discussing the topic in the class but I guess I'll never really know for sure.

But still.  We had a great conversation while discussing my paper and she was definitely my favorite prof out of the many I had in university.  If I ever need a professor's reference to apply for grad school in the US, I know she'd help me out.  Good times.  I'm so glad my last semester of university was as good as it was, despite all the work.  I really think that the more work you have to do for a class the more enjoyable the class is.  Even the class I took on Foreign Language Acquisition, which I stressed out a ton about, was incredibly interesting and enjoyable.  Which makes me think I really would have been better off at a better school, though I can't complain too much about the education I did get.