Surfin’ USA

Trip to Stockholm

For my PhD applications in the US and Canada I had to take one more test, the “Test of Spoken English”. It’s only offered a few times a year and only in some cities, so I ended up going to Stockholm on Saturday. I took a train at 7am and got to Stockholm around noon. The test was at 1pm and took only 20 minutes. It consisted of nine questions about different things, e.g. a picture story, a statistical figure and several role play situations, each of which with 60 seconds answer time. It’s hard to say if it went well, no idea really what the people grading it are looking for. Anyway, after the test I went to eat something and walked around a little bit, before taking my train back at 4pm.
So, all in all, I spent almost 10 hours in the train for 20 minutes of talking into a cassette recorder. I hope this was really the last test needed for the PhD applications — and of course I hope that all the efforts will eventually pay off.