Finals Week
Finals week: full of long days, late nights, caffeine, junk food, and plenty of stress.
Some people are more fortunate than others when this week rolls around. I was one of the luckier few. With a presentation and test earlier in December, I was left with only a take home test and two finals as actual exams. I didn’t experience as much of the stress or long days spent studying. (There might have been a few late nights, but spent watching TV and hanging out with friends.)
No matter how your finals week plays out, it’s exhausting one way or another. After flying into Port Columbus last night, I’ve spent most of the first 24 hours home sleeping in my big, comfortable, and greatly missed bed. Now that I’m home, my mom has asked multiple times if I want to go shopping for gifts, attend her friend’s holiday parties, start baking Christmas cookies…
After finding excuses to avoid all of the above in order to get a few more hours of sleep, I realize: Christmas is only 5 days away. What? I remember this happening last year. Immersing myself in thick textbooks and pouring over class notes to prepare for some dreaded cumulative finals. There simply isn’t enough time to completely enjoy the holiday season.
The decorations strung around the shopping centers before Thanksgiving are noted, but simply too early. I do remember some festive lights on Broadway when driving back to campus, and Rand did throw an elaborate holiday dinner buffet on the meal plan right after classes ended. I also have been guiltily enjoying many of the Starbucks Holiday drinks, or what my friends at home refer to as “Christmas in a cup.”
But I’ve found that listening to Christmas music just isn’t the same when trying to explain why a disjunctive argument is a valid inference rule in propositional logic.
In general, the holiday season just doesn’t mesh well with the intense workload that comes at the end of the fall semester. Although when I think about it, my friends across the hall did have time to string popcorn and cut out snowflakes for their dorm room and some girls did watch “How the Grinch Stole Christmas.” And there were Christmas lights hung in the boys’ rooms on the floor below mine. Maybe I just need to make more of an effort next year to get in the Christmas spirit while studying. But if I find it too distracting, I will gladly trade better grades for a shorter holiday season.
Fortunately, I have another year to figure out how to balance academics with the holidays. For now I better join my mom in baking those Christmas cookies.