The Final Countdown

Illustration by Elijah Greiner (C’22)

By Nathaniel Klein
Contributing Writer

What? We have those?

Jeez. It looks like we have finally arrived in FINALS SEASON! The time has come when all of our procrastination pays off, with textbooks unread, projects unfinished, and research unresearched finally is due. How to survive finals season, you may ask? The easiest way is simply to take classes that don’t have finals.

Because apparently that’s a thing.

I ended up almost accomplishing this on accident, with my finals consisting of a written test in a theatre class, a performance of a Shakespeare scene in English 101, and an InDesign presentation. Yeah, I guess sometimes Sewanee gods do have pity on the youthful freshmen. But before you start hating me too much, I calculated that I have approximately 30 hours of work left to do on that presentation, which might just sink my battleship.

BUT! If you are an unfortunate normie who signed up for or were forcibly placed into classes with standard, legitimate finals, I have a very basic series of tips:

First, transfer! They can’t fail you if you’re not there! Second, delve into the archives and find an arcane spell theology students in the sixteenth century used to get their god on their side! Third, create a blood pact with your entire class to not show up to the final! They can’t fail all of you! Finally, Study!

Now that we have all the joke tips out of the way, here’s the real one: Fail. Just take the L. Don’t fail fail, but if you pull a grade that is technically, literally, a pass, that’s fine.

Do your best, get a good night’s sleep, and pray to whatever god/void/chthonic monster you believe in. You’ve also got a couple pass/fails you can deploy, so if you’ve got that one sucky class you can go ahead and deploy that one! But the good news is that grad school in Norway is taught in English and free! Plan B’s make failure irrelevant!