The band Europe rocking out. Photo from web.
When you think about it, Thanksgiving break was hardly a vacation. Sure, plenty of us treated it as such, but for every minute I spent lounging around my home in a food-induced haze, the voice of the dutiful student (whom I had temporarily banished to my subconsciousness) would occasionally break through and manage to whisper that most frightening of words that gradually pushes itself to the forefront of student minds near the end of a semester: finals.
Finals are intimidating. Perhaps they’re supposed to be, but this intimidation certainly doesn’t make life any easier in the weeks following Thanksgiving break. Many professors assigned exams to be taken the week directly after; a fair portion of my break was spent buried in a botany textbook. Other instructors took the high road and decided to inform students of their end-of-the-semester assignments well in advance of the break.
Take my film class, for example. Our final paper will be a cross-analysis of Ridley Scott’s Blade Runner with La Jetee, a French, experimental short film. My professor reminded our class of this a few weeks ago, but I’ve known since September because it’s on the syllabus. The library has copies of both films on reserve, I’ve already seen Blade Runner once and I’ve actually had some spare time this week. So, why haven’t I started it yet?
There is a certain paralyzing quality to that stressful two weeks prior to finals week that, for me, seems to cause less productivity at a time that ironically demands more. My professors have all suddenly decided to altruistically ease up on their small assignments, no doubt in anticipation of the workload with which we will all soon be saddled. I’m hardly complaining about this, but now I have another problem: the illusion of safety that is hanging over my head. There may only be a little over a week until finals, but to me it feels like more. What I end up doing is stressing about work while simultaneously trying to relax with the pre-finals-freakout-leisure time to which we no doubt all feel entitled.
At first, I thought I was being presumptuous and lazy to assume that, having just come out of a five-day break, I somehow deserved even more time off. Then I realized I wasn’t alone. “There’s a pressure to have as much fun as you can beforehand and spend time with your friends,” said Cara Einbinder ’14, whose final project for one of her anthropology classes will involve a study of Pygmy tribes. “At the same time there’s a lot of work to do, and there’s a lot of pressure to do that.”
So either we’re both being too inactive, or maybe the recent vacation didn’t fully provide the mental holiday it promised. I know that most of my friends spent the better half of their breaks either working on final projects, or studying intensely for upcoming exams.
If you’re like me and most of your classes are in the humanities, papers are your major concern. I greatly prefer this; my experience with exams a la obligatory, Area Three general education requirements was less than kind to my GPA. Furthermore, there just seems something cruel about a cumulative, final exam that seems to endorse cramming rather than memorization. Final papers have always struck me as better indicators of knowledge gained; you can cram before an exam only to forget it all in a few days, but a good paper demands more attention. “Exams are not accurate assessments of how much students have progressed, or the amount of knowledge they have gathered in the classroom,” said Devin Cohen ’12, who is graduating at the end of the fall semester. “Placing students in highly pressured situations might be representative of real world settings, but placing them in a controlled setting where they must eloquently regurgitate a semester’s worth of information is not.”
Of course, not everyone feels this way. Some students relish the idea of sitting down and, within a few hours, being done with a class rather than having to deal with the more long-term stress that comes with the freedom of having a final paper. You can procrastinate on studying, but we all know the much more intense pressure caused by stalling on a paper until the last minute. I can’t even say with any certainty that I’m not going to be one of those students you see in the library at 3 AM during finals week, sweating into their coffee over the twenty-page essay that’s due in six hours that they knew about weeks in advance, and yet somehow couldn’t really work on until the last minute. I don’t recall having this problem last year; I had four papers during my freshman year fall semester, and was so thoroughly determined to not let them get the better of me that I actually found myself finished rather early. I remember thinking, “That wasn’t too bad. I could have wasted way more time.”
This seems to be the culprit for me. I effectively disarmed myself last year, hyping finals up to be more intimidating than they actually were, and this year, I’m totally underestimating them. This realization had me questioning whether or not I should have spent last Saturday locked in my room at my desk. I think the important thing to remember in the next few coming weeks is, as always, balance. Freaking out over finals isn’t going to make it come any faster or end any sooner, but it never hurts to have a few dozen thesis statements lying around either. •
