What Office Hours are like
Welcome fellow Jumbo! You are probably wondering what it feels like to go for office hours in Tufts. After all, office hours didn’t really exist…
It’s the end of yet another semester and it’s time once again for my quarterly crisis about the nature of time: why does it feel as if the semester dragged on for eons, and yet went by so fast that I’m still marvelling at how it ended so soon?
In my mind, the past three or four months are a blur of new facts, new faces, pages and pages of proofs and calculations, mad sprints from one corner of the campus to another, stints of caffeine-fuelled productivity, and one too many deadlines. It all seems to have rushed by so fast that those first days of the semester spent basking in the late summer sun feel like fragments of a half-forgotten dream.
And yet, in the midst of the actual semester, days can’t go by fast enough. I count days until there are no more exams, until I can go home, not wake up at the crack of dawn, and finally finish my Star Trek re-run. Christmas seems like a magical time far off in the distant future, and Thanksgiving an altogether too brief taster for it.
But time eventually passes by at whatever rate it deems appropriate, and the long-awaited end actually rolls around. The holiday season comes and goes, the presents are unwrapped, the cookie jars are cleaned out, and it starts all over again. Another year, another semester, and if you’re lucky, not as many deadlines.
Looking back on the semester after everything’s been wrapped up, all that tension seems a bit unnecessary. That ridiculously difficult homework project or that ten-page research essay might feel life-consuming when you’re in the midst of dealing with it. Hours and days might seem to drag on and on until it’s all sorted out. But at the end of the day (or the semester, if you will), it’s just another piece of a much larger jigsaw puzzle.
So whenever life seems overwhelmingly fast-paced and nothing but an insurmountable heap of deadlines, just step back. Take a minute to stop focusing on minutiae and look at the bigger picture instead. The clocks will keep ticking and everything will happen as it will, and what matters is the experience you gain and all the wonderful new things you learn along the way. So keep calm and carry on with the knowledge that you’ll be happily munching on a cookie and reminiscing about the semester sooner than you think!
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