End of Semester Struggle.

By Drew Baldwin

At this point of the semester, it is clear to all of us that our thesis’ should be well into the development stage, almost to the point of near completion as the end of the spring semester rolls around… in just a mere 3 weeks, scary. This, to many, including myself tends to be the most difficult stage of any project, especially with ones like our thesis that run the course of a semester, possibly even since the beginning of the fall semester in a way. We begin to reach that point where we really start to see the light at the end of the tunnel in our educational career and that alone can really begin to make working on anything school related difficult. You just want to be done, get out of school, into the real world and start working in a firm or wherever it is you desire to go. The issue here is that we can’t exactly graduate wait unless we do finish our work and produce quality work at that. This is most certain with a thesis, it is/should be the best work you produce in your college career as an architecture student and in a way, I think that weighs on us in the sense that we do want to put out our best project, not only for ourselves, but for future employers to see and with the strain of finding the motivation from time to time to work, it can be quite stressful. I wouldn’t venture to say it’s too much for us to handle, but it can definitely be taxing. It’s not only the work for our thesis, but the work we have in other classes that we really want to do our best on and receive the best possible grade along-side out studio/thesis work. One factor that comes into play, at least with me and my productivity, is the change in weather. I know this is true for others as well; once spring begins to roll around and temperatures start climbing to the point where you’re not freezing when you walk outside, you tend to want to be outside doing anything, whether its sports, hiking or just sitting out in the warm weather, it becomes exponentially harder to really get yourself to sit down and really work on what it is you need to do, for us that would be our thesis and other class work.

So this point in the semester becomes one of the hardest periods of time, for not only me or my classmates, but all other students and even adults out there working as well. But you just have to really start managing time as well as possible to allow yourself those much needed study/work breaks from time to time while still producing the work required.