Campus Blog: The Midterm Hurdles

Class, work, meetings, bed. Repeat.

My name is Eudora Linde and I am a college senior. I’m trying to pack as much as I can into my senior year before entering the “real world” while still maintaining my grades, being a positive leader with club involvement, holding a job as a waitress and keeping some sort of social life in my final weeks at Shippensburg University.

I love college, and love keeping busy by getting involved in lots of activities. Every once in a while, however, this love comes back to get me.

Midterms have finally started up, and I’m starting to often feel like I have jumped into something that I can’t get out of. After I finish one midterm, I don’t even have a feeling of great accomplishment – I pull out my planner to check something off, and it seems as though three or four more massive projects have magically appeared.

I hurdled through last week’s nightmare of three midterms (two papers and a written test) and a Spanish oral exam. Thinking I was going to be mostly free for the next two weeks, I took the weekend to unwind and catch up with friends who hadn’t seen me all week.

And then I made the mistake of looking at all of the syllabi for my classes (this is keeping in mind that I only have to take four classes this semester instead of the five that I would normally be taking). It’s safe to say that I had something of a standard Exorcism-like moment – in particular, the part where someone’s head just starts spinning around on their shoulders.

I realized that I have about five or six more weeks before finals. My finals (as of right now) include a 20 – 25 page international law paper, a final portfolio project for my last class of my journalism major (this portfolio is supposed to be able to help me find a job, so it’s a huge deal), a take-home political science paper (which I am beyond scared to even look at) and an extensive interview. In Spanish.

I then have Student Senate responsibilities, have to guide the initiates (prospective members) of Phi Sigma Pi through their final weeks of initiation, keep waitressing (because getting money somewhere in all of this would be nice) and try to keep in touch with my friends so that I don’t feel like I’ve completely called “uncle” and just disappear into my books.

I’m quickly learning that coffee and the library on campus are about to become my two new best friends. I’m aware that sleeping in isn’t going to be happening for a while, and that I’m probably not going to have many opportunities to go to bed early either. I know that this can’t and won’t last for forever, but at the moment, that’s of little comfort.

I know that the “real world” pressures of life can be a lot more difficult and intense than the ones that I am facing in my collegiate bubble. I don’t, however, know much of a world outside of this bubble, and am hoping to hold it together enough so that my bubble doesn’t implode and take me with it.
 

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