Saturday, July 28, 2012

No. 677 – Driven to Tears

Performer: Sting
Songwriter: Sting
Original Release: Zenyatta Mondatta (The Police)
Year: 1980
Definitive Version: Live Aid bootleg, 1985. The stripped-down version features just Sting on electric guitar and Branford Marsalis on tenor sax, and it made me a Sting fan.

Going through comprehensive exams—both oral and written—is a rite of passage at Wabash. In fact, it’s required of every senior to pass comps if he wants to graduate.

I had a bit more in mind than mere passage. I had more than exceeded my requirements for maintaining my scholarship all four years (details to come), and I was right around a 3.5 GPA. I definitely would graduate cum laude, but magna cum laude would look so much better, wouldn’t it?

I needed a 3.6 to get magna cum laude, and I wouldn’t get there even if I got 4.0s my last two semesters, but a 3.3 with distinction on comps would do it. (A 3.3 without distinction meant cum laude.)

Comps are the first week of the second semester, the first week after Christmas break, and they concentrate on your discipline. English majors start with two full days of essay exams—two sessions of three-hour stints per day. Then you had your orals with two professors in the English department where you are to select a dozen books, poems and plays and defend the rationale behind your choice.

After that, at some point in the second semester, you had your school-wide oral comps. They were campuswide in the sense that it would be three professors, all from different disciplines, grilling you for an hour or so.

There was no question that the English-only segment would be the most intense and would require the most preparation. In fact, I wasn’t sure it even was possible to prepare for the campuswide oral comps.

I had a serious plan for comps study. The plan, however, would require sacrifice over Christmas break: Instead of leaving immediately after regular exams, I’d stay through the weekend and drive home for Christmas, then turn around on the 26th and head back to Wabash till New Year’s Eve. After New Year’s, I’d come back another day early and get back at it.

I thought this was a good idea, because I wouldn’t have any distractions that middle week and really could concentrate on my studying, which involved rereading everything that was on my list. Matt said he’d come back then, too, but he didn’t, which was fine. I had the whole apartment—pretty much the whole campus really—to myself. If I played my Live Aid bootleg tapes once during that week, I played them 100 times.

I felt pretty confident going into comps week, and the written part seemed to go OK, which wasn’t good enough. I needed perfection—only the top two students in each department earn distinction. I felt less confident with the oral presentation in front of the two English professors.

I chose works that were meaningful to me rather than works that were unified behind a single theme. My choices mostly spoke to alienation, isolation and conforming with society, but I should have chosen a better grouping with that theme in mind. In the end, I wasn’t surprised when it was revealed that I didn’t earn distinction. Disappointed but not surprised.

Oh well, I still felt a great sense of relief when I was done. Now all I had to look forward to was finishing up and hopefully getting into journalism graduate school. I had applied to six schools, including my No. 1 school, Northwestern, in the fall, and I should be hearing back from them any day now …

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