Finals a breeze for the organized
Scott Blaszak
The Early Essays
The lines outside computer clusters are long nowadays, and the second floor of Hesburgh is beginning to look like a refugee camp again, which can only mean one thing: Finals season is approaching.
The kind people running this University try to lessen our plight by granting us two study days next week. And this is all fine and nice of them, to provide us extra time to prepare for our impending academic gauntlet, but if you don't manage your time effectively, you can wind up spending your study days as a celebrity judge at a Bible Belt bee-beard pageant.
Trust me. I've been.
But that was years ago during my freshman splendor, and in the time since those irresponsible days, I've become the most organized and dominant student on campus. So much so that pretty women often stop me on the quad and ask, "How do you do it, Scott Blaszak? How do you maintain a 3.89 GPA as a biochemistry and electrical engineering major while captaining the lacrosse team and serving as president of campus multicultural squash night?"
After I get the girl's phone number, I just tell her that staying productive during study days is the key. While other students are frittering their time away with Frisbees and videogames and Chinese finger-traps, I'll be positioning myself for unprecedented scholarly achievement. Here, take a look at what next Thursday holds in store for me.
5:15 a.m.: Alarm sounds. Hit snooze.
5:30 a.m.: Alarm sounds. Hit snooze.
5:45 a.m.: Alarm sounds. Smash it.
6 to 6:20 a.m.: Wake. Eighty-two jumping jacks. Memorize western civ. flashcards in shower.
6:20 to 7 a.m.: Breakfast at North Dining Hall. Three bowls of bran. One gelato.
7 to 9 a.m.: Study for theology exam by reading entire Old Testament, in Hebrew. Draw comprehensive lineage diagram for every man, woman and animal mentioned in Joshua through Esther. Commit it to memory.
9 to 9:30 a.m.: Half-hour respite at the Honors Program office on the second floor of O'Shag. Only here can I escape the drooling ineptitude of the common student body and talk Nietzsche with my true peers — those with accelerated intellects and ill-fitting clothes.
9:30 to 11:30 a.m.: Pore over biochemistry material as if being whipped by Einstein. Concentrate on intermediate metabolism until ears bleed. Then concentrate harder.
11:30 to 12:30 p.m.: Trembling from the preliminary symptoms of my weekly nervous breakdown, collapse onto knees at the Grotto and pray that I will somehow survive my 24 credit hours this semester. Curse the raw competitiveness of this cruel academic machine and spiral into a morbid ennui while pondering suicide as the only escape from this futile intellectual masturbation.
12:30 to 1 p.m.: Lunch.
1 to 4 p.m.: Continue preparation for honors Latin. Conjugate present tense. Conjugate future imperative. Conjugate subjunctive pluperfect, then the future perfect semi-deponents. Conjugate more. More, dammit, more!
4 to 5 p.m.: Check e-mail; respond thoughtfully to Alan Greenspan's questions concerning interbank borrowing rate/bundt cake. Decline John Updike's request for laudatory book jacket blurb. Mediate AOL chat room dialogue between Yasser Arafat and Ariel Sharon, persuade them to adopt a bilateral peace agreement.
5 to 5:20 p.m.: Minesweeper.
5:20 to 6:30 p.m.: Meet with George W. and explain the commencement address I've written for him. Reminder: As a student, "Dubya" is most responsive to role playing and Pavlovian conditioning. Bring sock puppets and sugar cubes.
6:30 to 9:30 p.m.: Relocate to my eighth floor Hesburgh study cubicle which I've made my own for the past weeks and furnished with a small library of books, Simone de Beauvoir posters, an espresso machine, a salt water aquarium and a butler. Study for microeconomics final and simultaneously write English thesis on Joyce's propensity for oversimplification in Ulysses.
9:30 to 10 p.m.: Study break. Free myself from the confines of my study cubicle by perusing PS 3531 to PS 3535, then retire to Hesburgh basement for Skittles and witty repartee with Kelly Siemon.
10 to 12:22 a.m.: Back to the books. My favorite: chemical engineering. Feeling myself approaching the culmination of scholarship like a parabola to its asymptote, I press onward with schoolgirl giddiness. Calculate the density of petrothene GA-605. Faster. Carry the one. Faster! Carry the one!
12:22 a.m.: My cubicle butler interrupts me. "You must eat or you will die, sir," he says. "Leave me be!" I shriek, hurling calculators at him. "Please, sir," he continues, handing me a strawberry Pop Tart, "for your mother." I eat it so that he will go away.
12:23 to 2:43 a.m.: Resume study.
2:44 a.m.: Suddenly it all comes together, a lucid understanding of the universe as all disciplines converge in my verdant mind into one sweet honey-knowledge. I stand with a slow inhale and, basking in my omniscience, begin to jig.
2:45 to 3:10 a.m.: Notice my butler passed out atop his graduate-psychology textbooks. "Lazy mammal," I say to myself, and, acting on a wave of compassion, I complete his entire semester's work in 22 minutes.
3:10 to 3:30 a.m.: Home at last. My mind is mush as I clean up the shattered remains of my old alarm clock and plug in a new one. Unwind to Chopin's Nocturnes and go to sleep after a two-olive martini. Tomorrow I will do it again.
Scott Blaszak is a senior English major. His column appears every other Wednesday.
The views expressed in this column are those of the author and not necessarily those of The Observer.
All Viewpoint Stories for Wednesday, April 25, 2001
