End of Semester Rush

I'm trying to decide whether the end of semester is worse or better than the end of a quarter. I'll definitely say it's more frustrating. At K (Kalamazoo College, where I did undergrad), the 10-week quarters were short enough that there wasn't time for too many, too long assignments. I guess part of that was also that it was undergrad rather than grad school.

Now, on semesters and as a grad student, each class has a final exam, a final paper, or both. Exams I'm pretty fine with: get a group together, have each person be responsible for writing something up about each thing we're supposed to know, get together one or two days to study, and ace the exam. Papers I'm also fine with, but they take WAY more effort. This semester, I have two final exams and two term papers between my three classes. Plus two presentations (of term papers) and one smaller paper which is due...in 8 hours.

Papers are frustrating because they're long--18-22 pages--and the give-and-take between research and writing gets me caught up sometimes. You're supposed to start with a research question. So, for example, "Why is the income distribution in Namibia so inequitable?" Okay, so now I need to research Namibia and equity. Different theories of equity. Namibia's Gini coefficient. What would an equitable distribution of income look like? Is the information I'm finding in my research relevant? What's my thesis? Do I know enough to come up with a thesis? What am I doing with my life???

And after hours and days of sitting at a coffee shop with noise canceling headphones playing a Ratatat Pandora station and thinking about little other than Namibia, I eventually have to call it good because my paper is due and I am totally dissatisfied with it but don't even know how to fix it. And then I get an A, so I forget how frustrating the process was and celebrate.

Anyways, I'm getting ready to dive into all that again, only this time I also have a fair amount of TA work to do, I'm running a half marathon in the middle of the madness, and pretty immediately after it all ends, I'm leaving for India! Which is really exciting! And I can't wait for a new adventure! And I'm not even that nervous about it because after going to Senegal for 6 months, spending 10 weeks in India seems like not a big deal!

The only hard part is being away from my family for too long and having to do the whole long-distance relationship thing again. I'm pretty positive it will be easier this time than when I went to Senegal (better relationship to start with, I'll have internet at my house, it's a shorter time apart, and we know exactly when we'll see each other again), but it still pretty much sucks.