Time is slowly ticking away for the end of the year…and the end of a school semester. Those school days are long gone for me, yet I still remember them. I have quite a few friends who are in college. No doubt they are in the stressed out mode right now….or if they have completed all of their exams, able to live a relatively stress free life until the end of the year.

• Dead Day – At Lipscomb University once the regular classes were over, we’d have a study day which was always on the Friday before final exams started. Even though it was called a study day, but many people choose not to study. Most of us called it “Dead Day” since nothing was going on at school. If students had jobs, they would just work all day and come back and study.
  On this free day, I can remember going to a 24 hour play…which is kinda a misnomer since the play didn’t actually last 24 hours, but instead was written and performed within 24 hours. The student directors would receive quotes which they would have to work into the dialogue of their play. I went to one of these plays and was impressed at the actual depth of the plot and dialogue of the play written so quickly. And it was funny too.
• Freshmen Comp Exams – For some reason Freshmen Composition (English) exams were held first thing Saturday morning. I guess they decided to get all of them out of the way. Freshmen Comp was really one of the few classes which most incoming Freshmen took.
• Exam Scheduling – Exams started on Saturday and lasted until the following Thursday. If you were lucky, most of your exams were scheduled 1 or 2 a day and could be completed within just a few days. Most of the time this was not the case. Some students complained that they had 3 exams on one day (which they could easily change by asking their teacher for an alternate time). I can’t specifically remember having 3 in one day. But I can remember having most of my exams completed by Monday or Tuesday, but having to wait until Thursday afternoon to take one lone exam before going home for the break.
• After exams were over… we’d pack up and go home. Friends had aquarium fish which they couldn’t take with them over the Christmas holidays. So they just left them and hoped the weekend/vacation feeder capsules would keep them fed until January.
  I can remember not taking home my computer during the holidays. I’d probably rethink that option now, because the computer is such and intricate part of my life these days.
  The dorms were relatively secure. However I wouldn’t leave huge wads of money lying around. One of my friends didn’t trust his RA and decided to put a password protection on his computer during the break.
  Rarely did I stay for graduation. Other than my own, I can remember going to 2 graduation ceremonies at Lipscomb. And only one of those was a December ceremony.