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 …
No comments:
Post a Comment