Tag Archives: finals

Home at last!

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After an exhausting finals week, I am finally home! I’m thinking that for the most part, all of my final exams and projects went well, so I haven’t felt the need to obsessively check my grades. Given the amount of time I think it will take my professors to calculate my grades, I’m not expecting them to be posted until Monday at the earliest anyway.

Looking back on my finals week, I’d say my proudest moment was finishing up my paper for Approaches to Everyday Discourse on Advice Animal memes. It was a fun paper to write, except for the fact that I pulled an all-nighter to finish it, and my presentation about it went really well. My professor really liked it and most of my classmates seemed to enjoy it too.

More memorably though, my suite mates and some friends and I took a few hours out of our evening on Wednesday to dress up (in suits and dresses) to celebrate one of my suite mate’s birthdays. This was the perfect occasion to come back to after having an evening final from 6:30 to 9:30, and I’ll remember it well.

It’s fun like that that makes me miss my suite already, but it’s so nice to be home! My mom picked me up on Thursday evening after my last final, and once home, I spent some quality time on the couch watching The Big Bang Theory with my parents, sister, and puppy.

Since home, I’ve been working on tackling odds and ends around the house, decorating the Christmas tree, journaling, and of course, sleeping quite a lot! I’m so glad to have a break so I can catch up on rest, relaxation, and reading!

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The End of the Semester

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Whoa. Another semester down. Except for me this is my last fall semester EVER.

But I’m not going to get all sentimental yet. Even though I am finished with my finals, I feel like I have so much left to do before I can actually leave McDaniel for a month and a half.

Instead of flying home, since I will be on a plane for much of January, my father is coming to get me tomorrow afternoon and we will drive home the next morning.

Before then, I still have one last final, an appointment with the Center for Experience and Opportunity so that my resume is ready for job applications, a tour, packing for home and for Italy, cleaning the apartment, and hanging out and saying goodbye to my friends.

This is the fun part of finals week though, when you are done with your academic obligations and you have no real schedule to your day and you’re just hanging out with friends and enjoying the end of the semester, reminiscing on how it was August like, yesterday.

Break seems long before it starts, but it always flies by, and with my break separated by two weeks in Italy, I know mine is going to go even faster. I can’t wait to get home and see my family, see my cat, and see my best friends. I am excited for driving, fridge water, television with DVR, and my own bed and shower.

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With Love, From Home

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It’s easy to get bogged down by all the stress, work, and sleeplessness of finals week. But not everything about finals week is bad: this is the time of the semester when many of our parents and loved ones become sympathetic about our plights as finals-burdened college students and send us care packages and other goodies to make our survival a little sweeter!

McDaniel makes it easy for parents to think of their students during finals week. At some point in the fall, the College mails out order forms so parents can choose from a variety of care packages from a company devoted to putting together care packages. These care packages were available for pickup yesterday, and I’m sure they made a lot of people’s days a little brighter! My parents sent me one of these last year, and I really appreciated it! However, I’ve convinced my folks that they’re better off sending me packages they create themselves (which they usually did my freshman year anyway) because unlike the care package company, they know what snacks and candy I like and don’t like.

When I was a freshman, some of my extended family members thought of me a lot too. I often received cards and letters. I also received several packages full of candy throughout the year, and my uncle even sent me a pillow pet for my first finals week. I still get a lot of letters from my loved ones, but it was during my freshman year that they spoiled me!

My freshman friends have gotten a lot of cute things in the mail over the past couple of weeks. One of my friends got a festive holiday Beanie Baby. Another one of my friend’s parents made her a family newsletter that talked about how much fun they had over Thanksgiving as a family and how much they couldn’t wait to have her home for Christmas. This is probably one of the most adorable “thinking of you” things I have ever seen!

As for me, my care package, with candy carefully selected to my liking, showed up today–just in time for the worst of my finals week experience to already be over. The fact that it was late was out of my parents’ control, but it still would have been nice to have some of that chocolate while I was writing my 12-page paper yesterday. Either way, it’s always the thought that counts, and when it comes to the gift of chocolate, I say better late than never!

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End of the Semester…Fun?

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Last day of classes was surprisingly easy for me, even enjoyable. In my Spanish class I took a quick quiz on the final chapter of our textbook and then we ended up just hanging out and laughing with our teacher for another 30 mins before she let us out early. This was a nice end to the course I thought. It’s nice to hang out with a cool professor and learn more about them, especially one that is enjoyable to be around like Dr. McNichols. Getting out 30 minutes early isn’t too bad either!

In my second and final class of the day, my teacher surprised us with a game of jeopardy to help us study for finals. I’ve always thought jeopardy was a great way for teachers to help students study. It’s fun, it’s easy, and really helps you figure out what areas you need to focus on for study. We were put in teams based on which rows in which we were sitting in one of the lecture halls on the first floor of Hill Hall. I, however, was late and ended up in a two person team with one of my brothers which proved comical since neither of us were truly prepared for a game of jeopardy and we finished out the game at -2100 points. It was still a fun way to spend the class and for the students who were prepared, a good way to solidify key course concepts.

After I finished classes, I resigned myself to the library and forced myself to crank out the rest of my 8 page paper which I had only completed about half of at this time. There was some work to be done to say the least. Mind you, with my mind in it’s present state, working on a paper means a max of 20 mins of productivity and then ample break time in between these moments of pure focus. Sometimes this is the way it happens though and honestly it is important to allow yourself this break time. In my case, if I do not take this little break time, I will end up becoming too unfocused to accomplish anything and will not get any work done. It’s better to get a little bit of work over a long period of time then none done over a longer period of time. After three hours of this effort, I had a completed, full cited and edited paper and could finally take a break.

Tonight, I’m celebrating my accomplishment by going to a Christmas date party my fraternity, Alpha Sigma Phi, is hosting at our apartment. Even though the end of the semester is really stressful and half the time I feel like I’m about to explode, it’s manageable with good study habits and knowing your limits. But having good professors helps too!

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An Unexpected Journey to Denny’s

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What’s one way to reduce some of the insanity that comes along with the week before finals? Drop everything you’re doing and go to Denny’s in the middle of the night!

This evening I found myself feeling cabin-feverish and unmotivated to do even more work. So when some of my friends showed up to my suite saying that they wanted to go to Denny’s, I was all on board for it. I needed to get out of my room and enjoy myself a little, and a lot of the rest of us did too. In the 20 minutes before we left, I banged out 3/4 of a page of the paper I’m currently working on so I could sort of justify such an outing.

Since the epic trek to Denny’s was made by foot, my friend Sam (who’s taking a class called The Hero’s Journey with me) and I decided that it would be our own hero’s journey for tonight. After all, we had to cross a highway in order to get there. (Luckily, at one in the morning, there aren’t many cars, which makes crossing relatively safe if you remain alert and aware of your surroundings.) I also joked that he should do his creative project for The Hero’s Journey on our trip to Denny’s.

I think Sam and I must have been on to something, for when we and the other seven members of our group got to Denny’s we were greeted with The Hobbit-themed menus that said “The Hobbit: An Unexpected Journey” on the front. This made my friends happy, since they’re Lord of the Rings fans and watched a couple of the movies last night in preparation for The Hobbit‘s release in theaters next week.

I ordered some pumpkin pancakes that were special to the Hobbit menu as a part of a Grand Slam, which gave me enough food to heat up and enjoy over the next few days when finals hunger gets the best of me. (Finals hunger is very real, and if not controlled appropriately, can be very fattening.)

Like all heroic journeys, my journey to Denny’s had to end with my return to my home “world” of McDaniel. Though my trek took two hours out of my late-night that would have otherwise been spent doing homework (incidentally for The Hero’s Journey), I’m actually feeling a lot more sane than I had been earlier this evening. Thank goodness for good friends and 24-hour restaurants!

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Fall Fest!

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McDaniel College really cares about our well being prior to and during finals week, and they show this by planning events to help students have fun and destress a little. Tonight, the Office of Residence Life (better known as Res Life), which is responsible for housing on campus, threw an indoor carnival-type thing in that they dubbed Fall Fest.

Fall Fest took place in Ensor Lounge, which is an open area on the top level of Decker Center, the student center on campus, and I don’t think I’d ever encountered as many people in Ensor as I did this evening. It was so well attended that I often had difficulty getting from area to area of the room.

Why was this so popular? It had what all college students love: free food, chances to win prizes, and an opportunity to have fun with friends. There were stations for making Christmas ornaments, tie-dye, and friendship bracelets and other crafts. There were games too: tossing the ball into glass fish bowls could win students real live goldfish,  while other games involved knocking down pins and spinning wheels for prizes. There was plenty of free food to choose from too. There were caramel apples, fresh popcorn, tasty smoothies, and even cotton candy spun by the Res Life director Michael Robbins himself. Other activities included a pie eating contest and bobbing for apples, and excitingly, students could enter a raffle to win a NOOK.

I spent a little time at Fall Fest and enjoyed myself a lot. I made an ornament, had a smoothie and cotton candy, and had a nice time chatting with people I knew as I watched people trying to win goldfish. Eventually though, it got too crowded for my liking, so I returned to my suite. I hope that next year, if they hold this again, they’ll do it in the gym so there’s more room for people.

It’s been quite a lovely evening though. Every night this week, I’ve set aside time for lounging in my suite’s common room and decorating it for Christmas. Tonight, I hung up more Christmas lights, and then my suite mates and I spent some time watching footage of a fire on a laptop while listening to jazz music–very relaxing and super classy! It’s important not to get too bogged down in end-of-semester work. You’ll stay much more sane if you devote some time to yourself and your relaxation every day.

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Papers and Projects and Presentations (Oh My!)

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I love college and I love McDaniel college. But one of my least favorite things ever is coming back to campus after Thanksgiving break to wrap up fall semester. I have a lot of things that I need to work on over the next two and a half weeks. For the most part, these papers and projects aren’t so bad on their own, but because there’s so many of them, they’re all too overwhelming. But since I do have a lot of neat things to work on, here’s a rundown of what those things are.

For Approaches to Everyday Discourse, I have to write two more papers, the first of which is due tomorrow. In this paper I’m doing a genre study of articles appearing in popular news sources that are written about Facebook. Doing a genre study of this nature involves reading a lot of these sorts of articles; my paper requires me to read and analyze 20 articles selected by my professor, but in a true genre study, you can expect to read dozens more samples of whatever you’re analyzing to find shared features of a given genre.

My final paper for Discourse will involve a topic of my choice. I plan on doing research on the rhetoric of internet memes (particularly Advice Animals) and analyzing them as a genre in addition to observing what stories they tell and what it is about them that we as internet users relate to them so well.

For The Hero’s Journey, I have two projects due Monday. The first will involve a paper and a presentation analyzing the hero’s journey in a work of my choice. Though I’m not a huge fan of Powerpoint, it will probably in my best interest to make one to capture my classmates’ attentions and help them understand the movie better. My project will be about the movie Stardust. Other students in my class have presented on Across the Universe, Iron Man, and Pilgrim’s Progress, to name a few examples. My second project is supposed to be a creative project in a medium of my choice that describes my own hero’s journey. I’ll also be presenting this in class. One girl in my class who already presented described her hero’s journey in terms of Ben and Jerry’s ice cream flavors, which was really creative and funny.

In my Grammar and Usage class, I have to give a partner presentation in addition to doing a take-home final. The presentation will involve my partner and I discussing the grammar of the German language and how it relates to and differs from English grammar. My partner and I have taken German for years, so even though that will make the project easier for us, we’re still excited for it because we think German is a neat language and we want to share it with others.

Lastly, for The Nature of Science, I’m working with a group of three guys on a project that has involved us designing an experiment the involves some combination of sticks, boxes, balls, and string, conducting and analyzing the experiment, and presenting our findings to the class in addition to writing a paper about it. Truth be told, I’m pretty nervous about how this is going to go, and it’s the project I’m dreading most out of all the things I need to do between now and December 13, the magical day when my last final takes place and I get to go home for Christmas break. I’m not a big fan of experiments, and since we have to construct and conduct it ourselves, I’m afraid that something isn’t going to work out. I just keep reminding myself that once this class is done, I’ll have my science requirement taken care of!

Needless to say, I’ll be hitting the grind pretty hard tonight (or at least I’ll try), but not before inviting my suite mates to join me in watching the animated How the Grinch Stole Christmas tonight at 8. I’ll make myself some hot chocolate and get some paper for paper chains to decorate our suite, and it will be a nice little breather before tonight’s long road ahead.

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End of the Semester Panic…Survival Tips

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Day one back from break has been eye opening and somewhat fear inspiring. With only two weeks left in the semester, students can be filled with both the relief of seeing the light at the end of the tunnel, and the stress of the fact that finals are only two weeks away. Also factoring into all of this is the exciting premise of the Holiday Season which has the tendency to make us relax and not sweat the small things all the while the small things are becoming more and more important. This of course not aided by the Holiday music playing in Decker student center. In any case, this has all combined to make me a semi-efficient, slap-happy mess.

Luckily I have the advantage now, as a sophomore, having been through this last year. If you’re like me, time management is much easier said than done. And I have the basic idea down. For example, I have no classes on Tuesdays and Thursdays so I have set to scheduling the HUGE block of free-time I have in the middle of the day, dividing the time equally among all four of my main classes, to make it as productive as possible. The problem with this, not surprisingly, is 1.) sticking to your plan, and 2.) when assignments take longer than you had thought. My Lit by Women class is tricky in this sense because my ability to sit and efficiently/effectively read a text is largely dependent on my mood which is variable like anything.

As I’m writing this post I have just finished what I hope will be the solution to my problem. See the end of the term has thrown a few curve balls at me. One of which is a full-semester research paper, one that I have not started, due next week. Since it is for my SIS (Sophomore Interdisciplinary Seminar) and not a class within my major, I don’t need to stress about it, still it needs to get done. So I have made a schedule and set individual goals within the assignment. By Wednesday I need to have all my research done, by Thursday I hope to have a Thesis and by Saturday afternoon I hope to have finished writing the paper then take it to the Writing Center to have a skilled set of eyes look it over and tell me what needs improvement and how to make a it a satisfactory paper.

The best way to attack a big assignment, especially if you’ve procrastinated like we all do, is to break it up and make it seem smaller. Then be sure to use campus resources like the Writing Center because they’re students too and they understand your battle. At the risk of being too preachy, the moral is to start your work early…but if you’re like me there’s still a way to make up for your mistake if you just stay calm and organize.

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