By SOPHIA ROSE YOUNG
FHSU student
School is a balancing act that takes a lot of energy and emotion, and you look forward to it being over so you can finally rest and catch up on your life’s to-do lists. However, when it is all over, your body is exhausted, and for me, I did not want to leave my bed or my house for a week.
On top of my 12 credit hours at Fort Hays State University this semester, I decided to renovate my home, start a nationally recognized student organization, work two part-time jobs and even study abroad. My son turned one and started walking. Chasing him around the house took up a great majority of my time. I was exhausted.
Many students feel the exhaustion, but power through. They work hard all semester, many of them balancing relationships, jobs and schools; spend finals week surviving off little sleep; sharing memes on Facebook about how dead they feel and thinking that once it is over they will feel alive again. But it’s not that easy; you crash.
I crashed. I went from light speed to walking speed in one day. The sudden change from being so busy with school to only having my part-time job and my child to focus on affected me mentally and put me in a funk.
I began to wonder how many students felt this way, that after all the energy they exert, do they also feel lost and down for days after finals week?
Just before finals, I returned home from Chile. I spent 12 days traveling with a group of students learning about sustainability, mythology, rural elementary education, biodiversity and agriculture. We did all this on a remote island in the southern part of Chile, where we were closer to Antarctica than we were to the equator.
I was able to feel centered for the first time all semester while I was sitting on an old tree stump in the middle of the woods listening to the water cut its own stream down the valley. Chile was good to me. It relieved the stress and worries that I had created for myself at the beginning of the semester, but at some point I had to return to the States, face those worries, and take all my finals.
Senioritis was an easy blame for how unmotivated I was during finals week. I studied and showed up to all my presentations, but I was checked out. I was fantasizing about the holiday break. I was going to have all the time in the world to work on my shopping, crafting, cleaning, reading and mothering.
It took my whole college experience to understand the vicious cycle of the high of starting school, the numb feeling as the semester progresses to the crash that comes at the end. My advice to underclassmen is to prepare for the after-finals funk. Do not make promises to visit friends or family right after finals, instead schedule yourself some serious R&R.
It took a week, but I’m back. I’m not in a funk anymore. What I should have done right after finals was hire a babysitter, turn off my phone, buy a couple bottles of wine and sleep. But I didn’t, and I suffered the after-finals funk.
Sophia Rose Young is a 23-year-old senior at Fort Hays State University majoring in communication studies. She moved to Hays from Lenexa in January 2013 and has since started a family. She lives with her boyfriend and one-year-old son, Theodore. She works as a student writer for University Relations and Marketing and is the co-founder of the FHSU Chapter of Public Relations Student Society of America.