finals

As my buddies still in school suffer through finals week, I'm feeling oddly reminiscent about my own stressful final exam/paper experiences.

My senior year, the last night of reading period, I moved my entire life into the computer science lounge. I had a 20 page philosophy paper to write, and I had not even started the research. After I skimmed through about 10 library books, I came up with a sort of thesis, but it was based on a computer science class I'd taken the previous semester, and only one of the books I'd skimmed was actually helpful.

So I went to the previous class's website, pulled up all the online journal articles we'd read, and tried pulling some quotes from that.

Still, I needed more. I thought I could find something useful in the Computer Science class's textbook, but a friend and I had shared one book, since it's not like anyone actually ever did the reading in computer science classes, and I had no idea where it was. At that point, it was around midnight, so I couldn't go knocking on her door to see if it was in her room, but I had vague memories of us leaving it on the grand piano in the living room many months before, so I made the walk back to my house to see if it was still there. It wasn't.

I freaked out for a while, and then pulled myself together and found the paper I'd written for that class. Sure enough, there were quotes from the textbook. I plugged them into google, and figured out that with a little ingenuity, I could use the "look inside" feature on Amazon to get what I needed.

And then, I put on some music (NPR All Songs Considered. Perfect for getting into a trance-like state.), and stared to type. I have no attention span, so every paragraph or so, I'd award myself with a nytimes.com article.

When I was about 3/4 of the way done, my all-nighter compatriot in the lab informed me sunrise was coming (apparently he procrastinated by reading weather.com? it's not like there were windows in the lab), so I went outside to watch it rise. I picked up the newspaper delivered to the science building door and scanned the headlines. I'd already read them all.

I walked to higher ground (near the campus center) to get a better view of the sun. Then, the sprinklers went on and I decided to run through them. Finally, I went back to the lab and pounded out the rest of the paper. What a piece of shit. But I finished the damn thing and somehow managed an A in the class. Possibly because my professor cared even less than I did.

ah, school. why am I seriously considering going back next year?