You read that headline right. I’m crawling my way to the finish line. And not in a fun, smiley, playing a game way. This is a desperate crawl to escape the impending doom of a fiery explosion that’s on a four day countdown. I spent my Thanksgiving break relentlessly working on essay after essay with a group project on the table for fun. Today I was able to cross off two of those essays and the group project. That just leaves one last essay. Bonus on that essay? It requires a presentation. All these apocalyptic assignments come to a close just four days away. Final’s week only features one final for me and it’s open book. All I need to do is get to Thursday and I’ll be across the line. Sure, I’ll be broken. I’m fairly certain to be completely exhausted. There’s a good chance I’ll be hating everyone and everything up until the final minute of class. That seems to be the general consensus for this semester. Without a true “fall break” we all ended up fed up with school within a week of Thanksgiving. We were just happy to be making some kind of progress.
Now we’re all back on a Monday after a week off trying to balance family events and the never ending pile of catch up work. Mix in the now very stark reminder of finals being a week away and I’m convinced we’re all mere inches from a complete mental breakdown. We’re all just trying to get to the finish line without pulling a hammy or falling flat on our collective faces. This is what it feels and sounds like to be at the literal end of the semester’s rope – desperately believing that indeed we will get out of this harrowing journey without losing a little bit of our minds.
The unique twist for myself and my fellow students at my college is that we attend a large commuter college in the heart of Downtown Denver. We’re all working part time, full time or overtime while we attend classes. Throw in a pile of essays, a few projects and a mind numbing group project or two and you’ve maxed out our bandwidth. We’re running on fumes at this point. Which means if you ask us how we’re doing, the response may be a sentence littered with alarmingly bleak Mad Max imagery spoken in the dark tones of Batman as he interrogates a recalcitrant suspect.
So that’s where I’m at today. Batman, Mad Max, a bit of Chariots of Fire on repeat and some pratfalls. Ah, college. What an experience.