So here I am, sophomore student taking 16 credit hours. Typical student, typical course load. I thought it was normal to have one final and a bunch of papers, I really did.
It’s finals week and all my friends taking 15-18 credit hours have 3-5 exams. I, on the other hand, have spent the last week writing essay upon essay and so it would make sense that my current state of being is not typical of that of the average college student during “finals week.” My friends approach me on the Saturday before finals week, “Hannah, how many finals do you have?” I, looking down and refraining from making eye contact, reply, “One.”
They stare. They tell me to “(insert aggressive adjective here) off” and they walk away from me. (tears)
So, here’s finals week from the perspective of a person with (wait for it) ONE final:
Sunday:
My final papers from all my other classes are turned in. My application to the Education department has been submitted. My one and only final is Wednesday 8 a.m. to 10 a.m. I’m sitting alone in the library because well, no one wants to sit with someone who only has one final. (I would say sorry not sorry, but it is a bit of a lonely situation.)
Monday:
I crack open my Discrete Mathematics book. My one and only final is not even required for my major, so do I even have to do that well on it? Yes, yes I do, because it is my ONLY thing to do. If I don’t get a 100 on this final, then I am going to write myself off as a failure at school. Complete fail. So after this battle with myself, I re-write copious amounts of math problems and four hours later, I have more binary trees memorized in my mind than I have the alphabet. As I am packing up my bag, my lovely and loving friend passes by and I make a rookie mistake of asking a sleep-deprived twenty-year old female how their day is going. She stops dead in her tracks, looks at me, and tells me how much she hasn’t eaten in 36 hours, hasn’t slept in 45, and hasn’t spoken in 58. I nod, smile, and say, “Well, I am exhausted from studying all this math!” She looks at me like this:
And I take that as my cue to just simply walk away. Far, far away.
Tuesday:
After a night of browsing the web for internships and summer jobs, (I AM trying to be productive, k?) my roommate walks in to the room at 9 a.m. I, wondering where she spent the night, ask. (Because any normal person would ask, right?) Instead of stopping dead in her tracks, she, flustered, moves from the closet to her desk to the futon to the sink to the cupboard, all the while explaining to me how she slept in the library, hasn’t showered, and has a final in half an hour. I don’t say a word and just watch as she runs around the room in a frantic fury. She leaves the room in record time, and I say a quick prayer for her success on the final. Feeling inadequate, I study a bit more for math. An hour later, my roomie and my other friends who took the final come back, looking like this.
I decide to just not ask them how the final went. I review some more math and go to bed early since my final is at 8 a.m. Lonely, productive day, you could say.
Wednesday:
7 a.m. waking up in the morning, (gotta be fresh, gotta go downstairs) I head out to my final, my friends finally happy to see me experience a bit of the same anxiety they are feeling. The final went well due to my great study skills and I am finally free!
I enter my room, spin around, and exclaim, “I did it! I’m finished with my finals! Yay, I am so excited! My friends, who are still studying for a final they have on Thursday, ignore me and say, “must be nice.” I, quietly, take a seat and call my mom, telling her my great GPA news and how I can’t wait to be home. Since all of my friends are studying their little hearts out, I watch The Parent Trap and tear up at it by myself. Totally, totally fine.
Thursday: I awake from my slumber at a healthy high noon, knowing by this point, my roomie will come in, being finally finished with her exams. As I am expecting some sort of worn-out, “I hate everything” look upon her face, she comes in smiling and spinning around. I am taken aback, and unsure how to respond. She has forgotten about how little I had to do and is now just so excited to finally be finished. This new mood has thrown me for a loop. Do I jump up and down, too? Are we going to run around the hallways? This is so exciting, I love Thursdays of finals week! We skip around together, happy as can be, with plans to make our last night of the semester an awesome time.
Well… turns out everyone across the street (and a good portion of our own friends) still have a final on Friday so we sit and watch some intense Friday Night Lights re-runs instead.
Friday: It’s Friday. The time has come for us to pack up our things and say goodbye for the semester. For those going abroad, this whole goodbye-scenario is much more emotional than usual. A whole year may pass before a reunion between friends, and a “see you next year!” is more plausible than a “see you later!” A sad day it becomes, and it finally hits us that whether someone had one final or five finals, we are all in the same boat. We all worked our hardest this semester and studied our hearts out. Upon reflection of the semester as a whole, my friends and I went through a challenge that we strongly overcame. We maintained our grades even with a rocky start and we found the silver lining in every cloud. When we weren’t out killin’ it in Stanford or O’Neill, we were in the library. We were singing at mass, we were running around the lakes, we were lighting candles at the grotto. We were visiting our nuns, buying presents for families who could not afford Christmas, or student teaching at every free moment we could find.
As much as I was hated during finals week, in the end there is nothing worse than hugging your best friend goodbye and driving down The Avenue, away from Saint Mary’s and out into the snow.
But hey…AT LEAST IT’S CHRISTMASTIME!!!!
Photos 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 10 Photo 9 provided by the author
Hannah Drinkall is a Saint Mary’s College Contributor to Her Campus Notre Dame