Study Days Are a Joke

For the past few days, I've been sitting around, trying to think of something to write a funny blog post about. I had a few options in mind - personality profiles based on choice of study spaces, types of finals schedules and public reactions to them, the procrastinatory powers of Facebook - but it recently occurred to me that they all essentially shared a common theme: study days and what a total joke they are. For my non-Notre Dame readers, study days here consist of (for the totally unjust fall semester) the Friday, Saturday, and Sunday before finals, when there are no classes and supposedly no official university events scheduled. The point is to give us students some extra time to study. The reality, however, is that it's three days of total mayhem and foolishness.

Let's start with the university's actual schedule during these three days. Lots of professors like to make their projects due during study days, and a good number of classes somehow even have study-day exams. So let's just throw the idea out the window right now that the only academic activity of this weekend is hours upon hours of reading and notecard making. Then there's the concert schedule. Pretty much every non-Folk Choir music group on campus has a concert at some point this weekend. The people in the concerts, then, are clearly a little busy. The guys in the Undertones have four concerts to sing in, for Christ's sake. This conflict with studying, of course, is not reserved for the performers, either. The Glee Club and the Undertones both have their winter concerts during study days, so God knows there is not a girl on this campus who won't be giving up a couple solid hours of study time to that beautiful, beautiful cause. There's a bunch of other things scheduled, too, but I'm too distracted listening to Under the Mistletones to remember what they are.

Then there's the unofficial events scheduled this weekend. Obviously, if you give a college campus three days without any real responsibilities but handling an impending sense of doom over the looming week of final exams, said campus will respond by scheduling more parties and going on more bar crawls than on any other weekend of the year. There's Thursday night, when classes are over but study days haven't technically begun. This, of course, means that everyone and their brother will decide that it is the perfect time to go out. "But like...there's no class tomorrow!" Then there's Friday and Saturday nights, which, you know, are Friday and Saturday nights. Furthermore, it finally snowed today, so everyone will feel the need to go out and celebrate by Tweeting about it excessively and, of course, getting out-of-their-minds drunk. Lots of people probably said at some point Friday afternoon that they're not going out tonight. Most of these people have probably since changed their minds, and are currently off wrapping up a pregame somewhere. (Note: I am not among that group. I'm sitting in my room, in sweatpants, writing a blog post. Oh, and I'm still not pregnant.)

Finally, there are, I'm sure, people somewhere on this campus who are actually getting substantial amounts of studying done during study days. Said people may think they are proof positive that study days are not a joke. Well, my friends, you would be wrong. The joke is, in fact, on you. There are a lot of people on this campus - far more than there are of you guys - who are going to get a decent amount of studying done this weekend while still spending plenty of time having fun, sleeping, and/or wasting time doing stupid stuff. A good number of the people who do study for these entire 72 hours will, inevitably, still manage to not do that well on their finals, which will suck. Also inevitably, there will be at least a handful of stupid jerks we'll all hate who will spend the majority of these three days totally obliterated and will still manage to get As on their finals. And come next Friday, we will all be done with our finals and going home, and life will move on regardless of whether you spent more time this weekend at Club Hesburgh or Club Fever.

So, this weekend, I intend to do moderate amounts of studying, do a lot of Facebook creeping, go to the Glee Club concert and a few meetings and stuff, and watch Chelsea Lately. (Actually, I'm doing that last one right now. And, for the record, one of the comedians just described a recent night of hers where the guy she was with showed up drunk and then made her pay for the cab, and the whole audience and even the sassiest of sassy people, Chelsea Handler, "awww"-ed and talked about how horrible it was. Please see my post "Dear Boys," and feel free to leave your "aww"s in the comments.) Then during the week, I have every intention of studying on the night before each exam and then leaving each successive one feeling more confident about it than all of you who studied all weekend. BOOM.