“Well, hopefully your other classes are not all keeping you too busy to do the paper.” Is this a joke? So I think that it is probably safe to assume that we have all heard this or some version of it. It is completely absurd.

Granted that I am a senior so I have had more classes to hear this over and over, but I have heard this every semester that I have been in college, from at least two of my professors each semester. We all know darn well that every class has a final of some sort, whether that is a paper, presentation or a test, “all of our other classes” cannot just cancel their finals because of the one hard final project or paper in the other class.

Writing from experience, it is always the best when a professor says this, and you are in your upper level classes so you have the same professor for two of your classes, and they know that they have assigned major finals in both classes, but don’t seem to know why you might be so stressed and not your jolly ‘ol self. You know why I’m not myself, I have two 15 page papers due in the next six days for a book I have only skimmed and that needs 700 sources. Valid, I have never been assigned a paper that needed 700 sources, but after paper number three, any number of sources feels like 700. 

While I understand that there needs to be a final in every class, and I really do not have any problem with the way that they all play out as far as schedules, my issue is with the professors themselves that think that their class should be your number one priority over the other classes that are probably just super easy right? Nope. 

Being in five, sometimes six upper division courses at one time, finals are always going to suck. That is kind of just the way that it goes. However, that does not mean that the professors have to be almost condescending about it, or feel the need to tell us that their project is more important than our other classes. I know that grading the tests and reading all the papers is hard after you get them all in, but reading a paper is without a doubt easier than writing one, and grading tests, you just get to tell us if we got them right or not. 

I understand teachers are trying to relate or whatever they want to accomplish by saying this, but to some degree, do not tell us something and then laugh to yourself, when you know that it is not true and that we do in fact have a lot of other work that we should be doing right now. We are so stressed that we do not even know where to start, and you telling us that “hopefully your other classes are not all keeping you too busy to do the paper” is NOT going to help. Please just acknowledge our stress and think back to when you were taking finals in college. Yeah, that is how we feel too, and we all just want finals to be over, just as much as you do.

Amanda is majoring in political science. She can be reached at [email protected]