This was a short entry that I wrote describing my most loathed of times during school. finals
But twice a year comes the special time of college life that we call "finals." Finals is something that every student will have to deal with during their undergrad experience; two weeks at the end of each semester devoted solely to learning everything you should have in the previous 14 weeks. These two weeks of tormenting are (for me at least) carefully balanced between trying to figure out what I need to know for a certain test and trying to jam all the necessary data into my mind. It doesn't matter at all that I probably won't remember any more than one fifth of what I study. Most of it leaving my frontal lobe about five minutes after I walk out of whatever room my test is in. The way I see it, that's all part of the game. Knowledge that an individual can throw out at a moments notice has a certain appeal, but I think that college is definitely about much more than that. Learning how to learn is infinitely more important than being able to quote Kant, find the derivative of a fourth degree equation, or rattle off the atomic weight of Cobalt. These things don't matter in the real world. Sure they may help; definitely for some people more than others. I certainly wouldn't trust a surgeon who had an encyclopedia opened up next to me in the operating room; asking the nurse, "do you think they mean the Appendix in the back of the book, or the one inside his body?"
My favorite place to spend my time during finals has been the study rooms in the basement of Eggers Hall. Walking down the stairs into the basement, I enter the study lounge, a big room with two long tables and four small rooms on each side of the lounge. Each one of these study rooms consists of a single table, suitable for two people to sit around and cram. I never shared, though. That would defeat the whole purpose of going down there. I went there to lock myself off from the rest of humanity, to try to muster up every conscience conscious thought that I might be able to squeeze out of my mind before whatever deadline I had. The nice thing about the study room is that you can close the door to almost completely cut yourself off from the rest of the world. Once that door is closed behind you, time becomes a mute point. There is no clock to tell you if it's time for dinner, no window to tell you if the sun is coming back up yet, and no music coming through the wall from your neighbor's apartment. When you close yourself in, time can be both your best friend and worst enemy, and everyone down there knows it. There is an interesting subculture of those who live in the basement of Eggers during finals. You see people at their most vulnerable, knowing that you are both here doing the same thing and that the time spent down here could easily be the difference between passing and failing. It is this known, but always unspoken, vulnerability that brings people closer together. It's almost as though people come together to pull through a crisis situation.
In the basement my biggest enemy was always boredom. Reading about the sociological aspects of Kenyan Running for 6 hours can pay a toll on even the most eager students... let alone me. During these boughts of boredom I would often wander around the rest of the building. Walking through an immense building, knowing that there may be at most 12 other people awake in the building at this time, you feel a certain freedom. I got to know several of the night janitors and often would walk around talking to them. I found a grad bay on the fourth floor of Maxwell that was always open, and always had the most precious of commodities available; coffee.
Eventually the time for finals comes to pass, and instead of looking on the building that was my home for the last 72 hours with a new sense of pride and comfort, all I can feel is disgust, knowing that the next time I come back here it will be for finals next semester.
Posted by dbgrandi at January 30, 2003 07:43 PM
| TrackBack