Monday night, or what was really Tuesday morning, was spent crouched at a table in Frist in a zombie-like daze. Powered only by caffeine and Ramen noodles, I reached a point where I consciously tried to think, where I tried to summon that deliberative thinking voice, and nothing happened. I tried to think and failed. Wow.
That was almost as scary as what happened later that morning, when my iTunes shuffle played James Blunt and I genuinely felt like I could emotionally connect to the lyrics.
Castrated — thanks, James Blunt — and relatively braindead, I thought about sleeping. I’d probably end up failing my economics midterm if I did, but at least I’d have sleep, which at this point literally seemed like the height of human happiness. By 3 a.m. Tuesday morning, day-dreaming about night-dreaming, I felt pretty lousy, probably miserable.
I know that I should feel blessed to be here, and that even if things get really bad, I should count myself lucky that I don’t go to Harvard or Penn — but let’s be honest: It’s hard not to be jaded. It’s hard not to hate the reality of the impending all-nighter, when all we really want is to sleep.
And so, in my sleep-deprived, Princeton-hating, James Blunt-listening delirium, I asked myself a bitter question: What’s the point of studying if it makes me miserable?
At first, I thought about it philosophically, thinking in ponderous terms of purpose and meaning. I’m sorry, I know it’s toolish, but I do have a tendency to get philosophical at three in the morning. Nevertheless, philosophy had no consolations for me. I had a bad week, sure — but second-guessing every action I make under the guise of a newfound existentialism just didn’t make sense. Plus, there was a point to studying hard for an econ exam. Though we all might denounce the ethos of the organization kid, I think most of us would prefer to be little organization kids than the opposite.
Ultimately, what I realized in my semi-conscious ramblings was that the weighty question of midterm misery was misdirected. My unhappiness wasn’t caused by the rigor of midterm week, but by the painful acknowledgment that I might be studying things I don’t enjoy, and in which I am, at most, nominally interested.
Though my week has been miserable, it really hasn’t been the midterms. Yes, midterms are stressful, but stress by itself isn’t upsetting. Instead, the stress of midterm week has brought to the surface a latent dislike for some of my classes.
For me, midterms have been a trial by fire, not merely in terms of my academic standing, but regarding the course choices I have made. The truth is that all my frustration this week hasn’t been the work itself, but what I’ve been working on.
I probably should have discovered this sooner than, say, six weeks into a 12-week semester. But it’s easy to avoid the truth that we don’t enjoy a class during the year. We can sleep through lecture, skim readings and generally get ourselves through the busywork by justifying it as such.
In midterm week, the work is real and the learning is also real. There are no excuses that can be made for a class we don’t enjoy during midterm week. That doesn’t mean that we enjoy midterms for the classes we love. But there is a distinction to be made between studying that is challenging and enriching, and studying that just seems like a waste of our time, a blanket theft of good sleep time.
Midterm week is a really tough week, in my opinion the toughest of the year. Some people have compared Princeton to a marathon, and in the context of my column, I find this analogy compelling. For marathon runners, the 20th mile or so represents a physiological wall where the body essentially resists the pursuit, wracking the runner with cramps and dehydration. For students, midterm week is Princeton’s version of “the Wall.” It’s painful, its exhausting, and it pushes scholarly endurance to the brink.
If you love what you’re doing and you’re committed to the course you’ve planned out for yourself, you can meet the wall and still have the passion to run for the next six miles. But if you’re like me, and your courses have failed you in midterm week, you might be setting yourself up to cross the finish line, torn by a deep regret that you ran the wrong race.
Peter Zakin is a sophomore from New York. He can be reached at pzakin@princeton.edu.
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