Don’t Sh-t Where You Eat, and Other Postulates
By Yasmin Gulec, Under the Arch Editor
This week I decided to rant about two things in one little blurb — it is midterms season so we all have a lot to complain about. Let me start off by providing a little background information. I am a double major in GLS and Journalism. And no, I do not have any midterms that I physically have to sit down and take in a classroom crammed with students stress-eating their pens and hyperventilating. I do, however, have essays, articles, research papers and other fun stuff due. I already get made fun of for being associated with LS so please do not attack me for not having midterms for Journalism too. As hard as it is to believe, my majors are also difficult. I, too, go to Bobst and stay there late, typing away, wondering if I will get to experience the outdoors again. Which brings me to my second point. I need windows to study; it is just who I am. My go-to study spot is the sixth floor. I do not like it when I see people watching movies, leaving stuff to go get dinner for hours or NAPPING in the study areas, oblivious to the students circling the tables like sharks, waiting for someone to leave. Go home, take care of yourself, sleep … and let me have my window seat and transcribe my long interview in peace. Don’t sleep where you work, don’t sh-t where you eat — these are common aphorisms. LISTEN TO THEM. Thank you and goodnight.
On the Timing of Midterms
By Akshay Prabhushankar, Deputy Managing Editor
Complaining about exams right before break is nothing new. The cavemen probably threw tantrums when their parents tested them on their fire-making abilities before they could go chase dinosaurs with their friends. So let’s talk about exams right after break. I’m already woefully prepared for an exam two weeks from today, and whatever information I have retained will definitely ooze out of my ears while I’m at the beach next week. Not only will I perform poorly on the midterm, but I’ll have wasted an entire week stressing over it — a one-two punch.
On Having to Skip Class to Study for Another Class
By Melanie Pineda, Opinion Editor
I consider myself a pretty organized person. My planner is my lifeline, without which I wouldn’t be able to keep track of anything in my life. I rarely ever skip class and I keep constant track of what assignments are due when. I’m the kind of student who knows when deadlines are and lives by them. I only ever skip class on the fateful days when I have to study for another one. Midterms have admittedly been the source of all my stress recently, and in order to feel adequately prepared for my exams, I had to make the decision of skipping my 9:30 class that I actually enjoy. Did I do well on said exam? I think so. Did I miss anything important in the class I skipped? Probably not. Will skipping said class continue to haunt me for the rest of this week until I feel the sweet freedom of spring break? Absolutely.
On the Strange Phenomenon of “Midterm Brain”
By Hanna Khosravi, Opinion Editor
I have Midterm-Brain™.
A few days ago, entrenched in work, crunched down to the second for time and running late, I got home with a dead phone and a dead laptop, somehow inconspicuously misplaced my phone into the pocket of a coat that I was not even wearing when I went to take off the coat that I WAS wearing and then spent 45 minutes trying to look for it with my friends who were genuinely concerned that my home was haunted because “how could it disappear if you walked in with it?” Turns out, there’s no ghost. My mind is just in approximately 1.7 billion different places. I call it “Midterm-Brain,” a work-induced mental haze that makes everything strange and foggy.
But it’s not exactly fatigue. It’s just a funky twilight zone between distress and loopiness, when your mind has reached max capacity for processing not only the amount of information you have to process, but also for planning out how you’re going to do it all in the next few days. How does this phenomenon occur? I don’t know. But Midterm Brain seems to render me and many of my peers something of a mess, as Cole, my fellow editor, kindly pointed out the other day when I lost my phone (again), this time in the WSN office, even though it was right underneath my bag on the table. PSA: If you see me looking for my phone during midterm or finals season, don’t help me — it’s probably sitting in plain sight and you will feel like you have wasted your damn time.
Next thing you know, you’ll be finding my old, beat-up iPhone SE in the refrigerator.
Midterm Blues
By Sarah John, Deputy Opinion Editor
The worst part of midterms isn’t even the exams themselves — it’s the widespread lethargy that one feels around campus. During midterm season, everyone is constantly exhausted, stressed or both. People trade in social time for long nights spent crying into their notebooks, and human interaction becomes near impossible to find. At this point, my friends could have dropped out or left the country and I honestly wouldn’t know. The only people I ever see are the security guards at Bobst.
On Questioning Reality Amid Midterms
By Victor Porcelli, News Editor
The last few weeks have been a little rough. Last week, in particular, I had three or four days in a row where I got less than five hours of sleep. One morning, I woke up sweating and anxious after having a stress dream about WSN in which our wonderful Editor-in-Chief Sakshi Venkatraman was screaming at me for some failure on my part. I ended up sleeping through my alarm and missing both the last lecture and recitation for a class that I have a midterm for tomorrow. For days I’ve been in a coffee-induced, sleep-deprived haze where I can’t really tell if I’m delirious or not. At this point, I’m hoping that coffee and/or Red Bull and/or the amethyst my hippie uncle gave me will carry me through the week. If not, my only comfort is that no matter what, I will soon be able to return to my home in New Jersey, where I have my own room, a couch I can sit and watch rom-coms on and a kitchen that isn’t disgusting (that’s a rant for another time). I realize as I’m writing this how desperate the times are when I can’t wait to go back to New Jersey. You know how in “Inception” Leonardo DiCaprio spins a top to see if he’s in a dream? My top is whether or not I want to go back to New Jersey and right now it says I’m in a f-cking nightmare.
On Not Actually Having Exams
By Justin Park, Under-the-Arch Deputy Multimedia Editor
Who would ever rant about not having exams during midterms week? Before you dismiss this rant as crazy, hear me out. The essay-writing-focused curriculum of Gallatin means that I don’t have any traditional midterms. Although I frequently explained this to my mom, I keep finding myself having the following conversation when I am talking to her on the phone:
“Why aren’t you studying for your midterms?”
“Because I don’t have any midterms!”
“How can you not have any midterms?”
Then, she’d bring up how everybody she knows has kids staying up until 4 a.m. studying for their exams. School work must be more like a leisure activity for me.
I don’t think that’s how it works.
Sure, memorizing sophisticated formulas and doing endless practice problems is challenging, but I’d say bullsh-ting about the German theory of doppelgangers takes equal effort. So next time when you are about to say “Gallatin kids are so lucky for having no exams,” maybe first try explaining why a room full of dirt is actually considered art.
Opinions expressed on the editorial pages are not necessarily those of WSN, and our publication of opinions is not an endorsement of them.
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