October may be “spooky season,” but the scariest thing this month brings for Trinity students is exams, and lots of them. Every week, I feel like I’m telling people, “this is my hard week; I just have to get through this week and then…” But “then” never comes, and the next week is more of the same — another test, another project, another paper.
You’ll always hear people talking about “midterm week,” but I’ve always been confused about when “midterm week” actually is. While there is technically a day when midterm grades are due, assignments may begin as early as a few weeks into the semester and continue endlessly. The spreading out of midterm assignments comes from a good place — professors don’t want us to have everything stacked all in one week.
However, the effect of having all of the assignments spread over such a long period means that other things tend to stack with “midterms” — other papers and projects, work, Trinitonian tasks. It feels like the work never ends, like every week is the same slog to the end of the semester.
The months of September and October can get incredibly exhausting for Trinity students since there’s only a day off here and there, and those days off typically don’t come with a slowdown of assignments to just enjoy the break. If anything, there seems to be more to get done when the long weekends roll around. While my high school senior brother’s multi-day fall break allowed him to travel to Japan with my dad, I only got a one-day class recess, a day that a good number of students don’t even have classes on anyway (I’m not bitter at all).
The fall is also a bustling social season, especially with incoming first-years getting their first taste of college life. There are all sorts of activities planned for them, and they’re busy trying to find their place on campus, but it’s not just first-years who have their social calendars full. Clubs, sports and Greek organizations are all planning out activities to get their members bonding and find new members, and of course, Halloween comes with a number of … social obligations.
So, while on the one hand, it’s nice not to have a whole slew of midterm assignments crammed into just one or two weeks, sometimes I wish I could just get everything knocked out. Trinity is very much a school where you’re expected to do it all, where you see all of your peers double majoring and leading a ton of organizations, and you can’t help but want to do the same. However, with so much on our plates and a constant influx of big assignments, “doing it all” becomes a curse.
The pandemic has led us to reevaluations of how semesters ought to be structured to best support student success and mental health, but some of the changes have come with their downsides. Maybe it’s time to bring back a true midterm week to keep us from having midterm months or even midterm semesters. Since balancing everything we have to balance as Trinity students is quite the ordeal, it may, in fact, take some pressure off of students if they can get their biggest midterm assignments done in one week.
