1. You dread March Break
This is when all the school children, from toddlers to high school seniors, come out. They flood the sidewalks and the buses and the subways. Your daily commute is disrupted by screaming children and loud, self-obsessed teenagers so that you can neither sleep nor catch up on readings. And all this is during probably the busiest time of your school year.
2. You think in thesis statements
Everything you say sounds like a thesis, or something else that could be written in a paper. You can’t think about issues without forming some kind of academic-sounding analysis of it. Yet, somehow, whenever you actually need to come up with a thesis for a graded paper, you run into a roadblock.
3. You can come up with all the punny paper titles
Even if the rest of your paper is terrible, you’ll always come up with an attention-grabbing title that indulges in puns and esoteric references that only other university students and academics will understand.
4. You collect electronic files of scholarly articles from your institution’s online library catalogue
…because these journals will one day be unavailable to you, and you want to get as much as you can out of your monstrous tuition fees. You probably won’t read any of these articles, but at least you have them if you ever wish to read collections of dry academic jargon.
5. You’ve forgotten that the rest the world still works or goes to school on Fridays
You have likely chosen courses in order to have class-free Fridays. Having a flexible schedule means you can do fun things on weekdays, avoiding the weekend crowd. But you also forget that the rest of the world is on a different schedule that is much stricter than yours. You dread having to one day go back to that schedule of sleeping early, waking early, and also working on Fridays.
6. You are in a perpetual existential crisis
Whether it’s because of all the philosophy classes you’ve taken, or the depressing novels you’ve read, or all the underwhelming marks you’ve received, you are bound to experience some kind of existential crisis. You wonder why you are even in school, or why you should care about it at all, since you know that nothing, in the end, matters.
7. Procrastination = creativity
Your best work comes from weeks and months of procrastinating. On the early morning of your paper’s due date, the muses sing to you and you crunch away on your laptop, altering between coffee and Red Bull, and by 9 you have your paper freshly printed and you hand it in, thinking quite highly of yourself for what you’ve done. Only 24 hours later, after you’ve caught up on sleep and the caffeine has worn off, you come to your senses and realize that your paper was just a collection of words without any sort of logic or coherence.
8. You complain about how oppressive academia is
…while also knowing that this is the last time you’re somewhat free from “real world problems.” You complain about the uselessness of GPAs and what you’re studying, but at the same time, you know that these limited years are the only time that you’ll ever be able explore yourself intellectually, personally, and professionally without too many repercussions.