Hell Week, Minus the Toga...

The worth time of year in any student's life, no matter what grade your in, is finals week. This week, as you would infer, gets harder and harder the older you get. Freshman year in High School, you start with a couple projects or tests that bruise your ego and study habits. However by senior year, you’re sitting in a quiet room, stress-fully reminiscing about the degree of difficulty of your finals a few short years ago. This brings us to college, or as its better known, Hell Week.

Now, as normal sane person would, all semester you attend class. As you normally do in class, you act like a sponge, taking notes, and soaking up as much knowledge from your professors as possible. Then, come finals time, it’s like someone rung out your sponge.

The problem is that your average college student doesn't have perfect recall. Not to mention the couple classes missed, and the few 9AM classes in which you’re still your still feeling the ample effects of the start of your weekend the night before. This causes our brilliant young minds to embark on something so intertwined with college life, it makes a better pair than chocolate and peanut butter, binging. Except, this time it's not substance abuse, it's knowledge abuse.

To binge is the act of gorging yourself with a particular stimulus. In this case, what your binging on is studying. During this week, college students all across the nation, this one included, review the course material for a final so heavily, that they develop an intimate relationship with your notes. This causes erratic eating and sleeping schedules, and turn all those who engage in such methods into neurotic stress-filled drones.

What's the end result? Well, you usually do well on finals due to the fact that thanks to your obsessive study methods, you know the material better than you know yourself. You've spent so much time with your notes, that you both have each other’s name tattooed on your asses. Not to mention the after effects. Now, I'm not sure if you're aware, but the world doesn't operate on a schedule that starts at 1:30PM and ends around 4:30AM. This is not only not healthy, but there's only so much television one can watch before you run out of reruns in the OnDemand library, and cable TV past 2AM is awful. It's all news reruns, syndicated cop shows, and infomercials of everything from Billy Mays' love juice to the Serial Killers' dream vacuum. (It never looses suction and cleans deep down to get the bloodstains you missed with the bleach!) Or my personal favorite, the hand-held electric saw that can cut a car in half, because I remember the last time I needed to saw through an elephant.

Bottom line, Hell Week has lasting effects. Surviving this week is like finishing a Marathon. You feel this lasting sense of accomplishment, coupled by the fatigue of every muscle in your body. Something needs to be done about this week. I can't even fathom next semester, or better yet, the next seven years.