Like the last fifteen meters of a 100 meter sprint, the final few weeks of class are always hardest. The finish line is in sight, but the burnout is a struggle to overcome nonetheless. A friend of mine made a joke last night that it is always either finals or midterm season at Chapel Hill and I couldn’t agree more. We’ve all been swamped with work for what seems like months, and the motivation levels are at an all time low. We keep pushing, however, for the only way out of the pain is through.
In English 105i we are wrapping up our literary analysis papers in preparation for the video essay for the unit three project. This is by far our messiest unit, with the humanities having no real objectiveness to it. The messiness represents a stark departure from our normal work in the course so far, which has focused on the much more quantitative health and social sciences. For me, this has been the hardest unit, as the free-form nature of humanities writing is foreign to me due to my background in scientific research. I am thankful for the extra time we have had since turning in the 3.1 feeder assignment to get feedback both from my peers and from Paul in order to present my best work. Unit three has helped me expand my writing abilities outside what I was comfortable with, as it no doubt has done for others.
In the coming week after submitting feeder 3.2, we will be working on finalizing our videos for unit three and beginning the end of the class. The video creation and editing process should be smoother this time around after we were able to refamiliarize ourselves with the script writing and video process. The new groups we have for this unit should also help, as getting new perspectives into your literary analysis and script helps us find areas to improve that our old groups might have overlooked due to being familiar with our writing. It is also crazy to think about how this is our last project for the semester, which is an odd thought to me. Like many, I’ve gotten into a groove of school work and it feels like this pattern will never end. The extra credit assignments are also due soon, and so I’ve started work on those in order to help replace one of my feeder grades in order to achieve the best grade possible in this class.
While it seems odd that this work flow will end soon, I know many of us are looking forward to the day when we don’t have to wake up for that 8 am or stay up until midnight studying for an exam that is in the morning. But, like the night is darkest right before dawn, there is one final stretch to get through. Finals season is like those last fifteen meters were the lactic acid in your legs is screaming at you to stop but you known that you can’t. So, instead of giving up, we’ve just got to suck it up and push through these final three weeks in order to get some well-deserved rest.
Image Source:
“100m Dash” by Phil Roeder is licensed under CC BY 2.0
https://search.creativecommons.org/photos/a3870a77-2060-4399-a52a-e7225862146d