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Eight a.m. is early for anything.
It's really early for final exams. Especially ones on state and local government and politics. But backed by no more than four hours of sleep, after studying hundreds of flashcards for what was as close to an all-nighter as I'd ever gotten, I had a cup of coffee and took the test.
With every bubble of the Scantron, my wide eyes welled up a little, until I turned in the exam, stepped out of my University of South Florida classroom and burst into tears.
The reason? College made me crazy.
Why wouldn't it? High school suddenly seems safe after you're sometimes plucked from everything you know and thrown into a world of setting your own schedule, making your own decisions and hoping none of them cost you a successful future.
You have to stalk students to steal their parking spaces when you can't find one, and drag-race down Alumni Drive when you spot one from the street, hoping you're the only one who's seen it. As soon as you park, a band of stalkers with surveys and petitions follow you all the way to class.
And try waking up in the night from some of my dreams, like the one about using a pen instead of a pencil on a test, or the one about sleeping in on graduation morning. Worse was the time I got to class, sat back to relax and realized — upon the professor's calling my name — I was to give a presentation. And I'd completely forgotten. (That one really happened.)
Most of it's a blur now, but that's what it took to traipse through the Sun Dome in a cap and gown. Three years of skipping lunch for class, of skipping one class to study for another, of losing sleep to study some more, losing weight with worry and losing most of my mind by finals week.
"I'd say about four students per semester break down in front of me," said Stephanie Moss, a professor of English at the USF, whose classroom I graced with a face full of tears and a mind full of worry during spring finals last year. She says most of the time, the breakdowns are because of a student's "inability to finish an assignment because of overload, a desire to graduate as soon as possible, personal crisis, anxiety about graduation."
If you also have a job, the pressure builds. And when the pressure builds, we start doing things like assuming we failed our final exam when in reality, we may have aced it. After that 8 a.m. final, I felt my grad school hopes and career dreams fall faster than the mascara and tears down my face. My mind spun with all the ways I could explain my first academic failure, and I spent days preparing for the day the prof would post our grades.
When the wait ended, I couldn't bear to look. So I braced myself while a classmate's finger raced up and down the list to find my score. I held my breath. She cleared her throat. And she shared with me news so outlandish, so nearly obscene, that at first, I refused to believe her.
I'd passed.
After all the classes, exams and stress, I could officially ask my friends to call me Arleen, B.A.
Don't get me wrong, I'm really glad I'm done. Finished. Forever, if I want. In fact, I may throw a party or something next week, USF's finals week, just because I don't have to study.
Not to rub it in or anything.
— Arleen Spenceley graduated from USF in December. She can be reached at aspenceley@tampabay.com.
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