Students’ Views

The majority of my time this week has either be spent sitting in the same spot in the library typing an 18 page paper on writings of Marx and Tocqueville for my Political Philosophy class… or doing the complete opposite… procrastinating! Finals week is an incredibly stressful time at Southwestern. You can see it in the faces of people sitting in the 24 hour computer lab at 2:00 in the morning, working hard to finish their final due the next day. It’s a time where everyone is focused on ending the semester on a high note, and where everyone is looking for a way to relax a little bit with so much stress in the air.

Southwestern has several traditions that help eliminate some of the stress that finals bring. One of these traditions is called “Late Night Breakfast.” This is where the professors serve the students breakfast in the Commons (our dining hall) on Tuesday night during finals week. There is music, karaoke, and lots of good breakfast foods. It’s a nice way to both escape the paper you’re writing as well as to get a late night snack because chances are, you’ll be up the rest of the night studying.

Final Scream is another tradition at Southwestern during the week of finals. It’s a 10 minute period on Wednesday night, during the middle of the intense week, where no quiet hours apply. You would think that this wouldn’t be such a big deal, but that is not the case. People go so crazy during these 10 minutes, by blasting music from their dorm room, throwing various items off of balconies, or actually screaming. The Resident Advisors (RAs) let this madness go on for the entire 10 minutes, and then everyone cleans up the mess that has been made and goes back to doing their work. This year, the Final Scream in the sophomore hall of Moody-Shearn (where I live) and the neighboring hall, Herman Brown, was especially outrageous. I’m really surprised that the RAs let it go on because it was incredibly loud, many things were thrown off the third and second floors of the dorms, and there may or may not have been fireworks involved. Nevertheless, all of the mess was gone this morning, and Final Scream worked as a distraction for everyone!

Despite all of this, finals week has been somewhat relaxing for me this year. Being a political science major (and taking many philosophy classes this semester) has allowed me to have papers due instead of actual examinations for my finals. I had three papers and two tests this year, which for me, has been a lot easier than having to study for tests all week. The papers went fairly well and I took advantage of all of my professors’ office hours by going in during the week and discussing the papers with them before the due dates.

The weekend before finals allowed me to go out and have fun before the worrying about all my tests and papers began. On Friday night, I went to Kappa Sigma Semi-formal, which is a date party where we had dinner at Romeo’s (a really cute restaurant on the Square in Georgetown), and then had a party later on that night. Events like this, which are part of Greek life as well as other organizations at Southwestern, are always fun because they give an opportunity to get dressed up and go out for a nice dinner.

My suitemate, Rachael, and I waiting for our dates to come pick us up for Semi-Formal.

On Wednesday, my roommate, Lindsey, organized a panel of Southwestern students to go visit Jarrell High School (a small town about 15 minutes from Georgetown) to talk about the college search process. Jarrell is a very small school, with the same school housing the students from kindergarten all through high school, and they don’t have a lot of students who move on to college after graduation. Lindsey worked with a girl who graduated from Jarrell at the Yoga studio in Georgetown and after talking about the lack of college preparation the high school is able to provide, Lindsey decided to create a program that would help fix this situation. Five Southwestern students, including myself, went and talked to the entire Junior and Senior classes of Jarrell H.S. about financial aid options, reasons to go to college, what college is like, majors offered, and facts about the SAT and ACT. We didn’t talk specifically about Southwestern, but just about college in general, and we tried to explain the reasons why college can be beneficial. It was really interesting to hear the students’ questions and what their ideas of college were. Most of them just asked us about parties, but you could tell that a lot of them, especially the juniors, were able to gain some helpful information from our panel discussion. It made me feel really good to be able to do some volunteer work during finals and helped take my mind off of all my worries and focus it on helping to educate others.

Tomorrow after my 8:30 am Public Policy final, I will be celebrating! My plans for rewarding myself for being done include going to dinner and to the Trail of Lights in Austin with my friends. Although finals are stressful, there are many ways to ease the pain of the week, either by taking a break and giving to others, by letting out a Final Scream, by eating some breakfast served by that professor who gave you a long paper to write, or by relaxing and going out with friends.