Looming Finals

When finals are looming, the two most entertaining places in the world are the library and the near-campus café.

The library is always fun because you get to watch the students who haven’t been in the library since they toured it with their parents when they got the campus tour as a senior in high school. They’ll walk around slowly, clutching their slip of paper that has the location of the one book they need. They nonchalantly try to study the maps while the more experienced students breeze by them.

The other students I like to watch are the poor folks huddled over a laptop, barricaded in their little cubicle by stacks of books that you just know they were meant to read for this class but never got around to it. I always feel for them. They’ll be there all night trying to build a classes worth of reading into a paper.

In the more raucous areas, you get the barely controlled chaos of the group projects. Four or five students who finally decided to get together to plan out their presentation.

They’re usually of two types. One group will be silently sitting together, everyone staring at their notebooks. Occasionally, someone will say, “We could do a PowerPoint thing.” Everyone will suddenly pipe up and agree, but then the group will fall into silence again. The more entertaining group is the one made of all friends who thought it would be cool to do the project together. They probably ordered pizza and snuck it in to the study rooms. They’re loud enough to disturb the quiet group, not that the quiet group would complain. They don’t really talk about the project much, but they have a great time doing it. I should mention that I have no idea how either one of these groups ever get their project finished.

But the café… In the café you usually get a different group of folk altogether. The cafés are usually further away from the campus, so the dorm-bound are excluded. When you walk in, you feel the difference. If there’s a free hotspot, then the laptops spring up everywhere, with tangles of power cables snaking dangerously across the floor.

Here you find the students that have been here all along. They stumble in, order the same thing they always order (preferable caffeinated and refillable), and then fight for a table to occupy for the better part of the day.

Here you have the grad students with piles of bluebooks or neatly stapled printed pages that slowly accumulate their ribboning of frustrated and angry red pen-marks.

Here you get the guy in the corner who may be a student, but you get the idea that he just likes reading Kant, and maybe he wants you to think he’s a student.

Even the person behind the counter has a well-marked copy of The Drowned and the Saved that she looks at in between customers.

The most entertaining visitor is the local. They walk in with a confused look, stepping over-carefully over the power cables. They don’t understand what they’ve stepped into. Why isn’t there a table available at two in the afternoon? What are all these kids doing here? They usually leave quickly without talking much.