My Semester’s Story

My Semester’s Story

I groaned as I looked at the screen in front of me at the email I had just received. As my eyes found the name of the message’s sender, I felt shivers run down my spine. The email contained a simple message from a helpful and understanding man, yet I felt the pit of my stomach fill with fear nonetheless as I read his memo. My first semester was officially over, the deadline for every mighty deed to be completed was hours away, yet here I sat in front of a computer, a sick feeling of dread in my bones, reading an email that caused memories of my entire journey so far to crash into my mind. The email’s contents were neither threatening nor hostile, yet the feeling of calm, ominous expectation seeping through the words may have been the scariest thing I had faced my entire journey thus far. As my eyes soaked in the words, I felt the dread intensify. The name of the email’s topic was simply one word: “Dude,” and the rest of the message was equally simple: “Need the creative paper …”. Why would a message as seemingly harmless as this affect me to my core so deeply? The answer is simple: this message epitomized the culmination of my entire college experience so far.

I sat tensely in the chair and my mind strayed to the past three and a half months. Back at the end of August, I had been a bright-eyed, homeschooled, optimistic whipper-snapper who had been very happy in his high school career “not to have attended schools for the public” (Meditations, 1.4). I arrived on campus ready to make friends and succeed in my classes, all too unaware of what I was stepping into. I had no idea that when I took those first steps, I was unintentionally issuing a challenge that would not go unnoticed. By having the audacity to desire a higher education, I was apparently challenging the authority of a powerful entity that possessed the treasure I was seeking. I was on a quest to obtain a mystical item called a “degree,” an item of such power that legend says that merely holding one makes you more likely to obtain wealth and employment in life. Although I had no idea what I would do with one, the lure of its appeal was too great for me to resist, and so I had set forth in a pursuit to obtain one for myself, unaware of the wrath that I aroused in doing so and the unintentional challenge that my soon-to-be foe had accepted.

When I arrived, I enjoyed myself. I made friends and allies pretty quickly—fellow adventurers who were also on quests for their own respective laurels—and I felt as if I was going to make it without much trouble. The first week was a breeze, the second caused me to feel a certain unease, and the third was when I realized my mistake in angering the keeper of the degrees. You see, the degree I sought was currently in the possession of a creature called College, and I was painfully ignorant of the fact that College does not like to give up his degrees easily. In seeking one of these treasures, I had caught College’s attention and he was now determined to make me prove myself in order to receive one.

As the weeks progressed, the challenges intensified, and College tried harder and harder to destroy my will to keep struggling towards my prize. He sent evil demons known as Assignments after me, and though I would do my best to conquer them as they came, sometimes there would be too many of them for me to fight at once. When enough Assignments would surround me, they would converge into the monstrous Homework, a many-headed demon that was almost impossible to fully defeat because every time you cut down one head, a new Assignment would rise up to take its place. At times I would be overwhelmed by the seemingly horrible impossibility of my goal. I tried desperately to think of a way to keep pressing on, a path to take that would allow me to defeat all the obstacles hurled in my way by my self-professed foe. I “heaved in a churning sea of anguish, / [my] thoughts racing, here, there, probing [my] options, / shifting to this plan, that” (Aeneid, 8.21-23), when suddenly College caught me in one of his most deadly traps.

Although college was a formidable foe with many terrors and minions at his disposal, he was not the only one. I had allies and accomplices of my own. Some had joined with me after I arrived, some had come with me from home, but out of all the companions who were there to support me, there was one who had been with me longer than almost any other. Back in high school, we had spent hours upon hours together, night after wonderful night in each other's company, just passing the time and enjoying each other’s presence. My ally had made the journey with me to school and, although we both knew that we would have to spend less time together than before, neither of us had thought that it would be too much. Neither of us had known how incredibly wrong we were. College took advantage of our lack of preparation and tricked me with a horrible lie. He deceived me into believing that my ally was actually not needed in order for me to succeed. Through the stress that his challenges brought, he caused me to believe that my great friend was actually a hindrance to me completing my tasks, and that his presence was really hurting me in my battles against the Assignments. And so, I made the horrible mistake of avoiding my friend. I still cared about him and wanted to spend some time with him because I had grown up with him, but those periods of time became increasingly shorter as the days dragged on.

Fortunately, many of my other allies noticed what I was doing and saw it for the mistake it was. They told me, one after the other, that I needed to spend more time with my friend than I was and that it was bad for me to avoid him. Deceived by College’s lie, I made excuses for what I was doing and continued to try to make it without him. Eventually, however, I started listening to them and wondering if they might be right. The final blow that broke the bars of College’s trap came from an ally that had been in my place before and possessed much more experience than me (as well as a powerful degree of his own). This ally happened to be one of the professors employed by College and, although he issued the challenging tasks that College demanded, he was always understanding of my situation and offered assistance whenever he could. He would tell me every class that I needed my friend and that it would be best if I could spend 7-8 hours with him every night. One day, all the comments he had made hit home and I realized that I should not have treated my friend in the way I had. As soon as I could, I went to my friend and apologized. He welcomed me back with open arms and Sleep and I spent the entire Thanksgiving Break together.

College soon discovered that I had overcome his trap and quickly formulated another plot. If I would no longer stay apart from Sleep, then he used it as an opportunity to get me to spend too much time with him. He gave me so much to do during the week that when the weekend finally came to give me a break to finish what I needed to do, all I wanted to do was spend time with Sleep and I would end up spending most of the weekend with him. This was the opposite end of the spectrum, I had gone from one extreme to the other, one vice to another vice. Neither of these amounts of time were virtuous amounts of time spent with Sleep, and as a result, neither one was beneficial. Sleep and I discussed it together and realized that if I was going to make it, I would need to shoot for a “middle-ground” of sorts in our time together. We decided that with our time together, like most things, “there is an excess, a deficiency, and the middle term” (Ethics, 1106b24-25) and that we needed to aim for the middle term.

College continued to hurl his bolts of fury at me, but I continued to drag myself along and, before I knew it, the semester was almost over and it was time for finals. Sleep and I tearfully decided that I needed to take a brief hiatus from him in order to conquer all the tests, but that I would return to him with much joy as soon as the week ended. And so, I went through the week, late into each night, battling Assignment after Assignment, conquering test after test, and in the blink of an eye, it was Friday and the majority of my fellow adventurers had already left to make their treks home for the holiday break. The campus felt strangely empty and sad without their presence, and I fought away distracting thoughts of this as I raced against the clock.

I was left alone, sitting in front of a computer, slicing down my last few Assignments, forcing myself to press on unwaveringly. The deadline rapidly approached for all the monsters to be conquered and I sat there, reading my ally’s email, reflecting over the semester, and hacking away at the creature’s heads. The email had initially filled me with fear as I read it because it brought to my mind the culmination of my enemy’s power: his terrible distractions, Homework, and deceptions, and the dread that after all I had been through, I might not make it to my destination and gain the prize that I so desperately sought. But as I sat there reminiscing over the semester and thinking about my future, the fear began to dissipate as I walked through the story in my mind. Overall, the semester had been good, and even though there had been plenty of rough spots, I had enjoyed many parts of it and I had grown since first setting out. My struggles with College were not over, I still had a few years left to go, but I had survived my first semester and that alone felt like a huge milestone. As I sat at the computer, considered my past, and looked forward to the adventure yet to come, I recalled to my mind that no matter how hard the struggles get, no matter what College or the even bigger giant of Life throws at me, I am not alone and I will make it through to the end. I started this journey because I trust in God and I will finish it because I trust in Him. And so, with the fear significantly abated, I looked again at the screen and began to respond to Dr. Jacobs’s email.