Campus

OF MARGINAL INTEREST | Finals Season: A Series of Unfortunate Economic Fallacies

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Finals week can bring a lot of things to the surface: the sudden motivation to learn everything, a seasonal caffeine addiction, an awe-inspiring general state of self-loathing. After barely making out alive from seven finals seasons, I have come to realize that finals week also brings out the economically irrational agent hidden in all of us. Here I have listed a few principles of behavioral economics, applied to the disaster that is Cornell finals week (special thanks to Karna Malaviya):
Hyperbolic discounting
Finals season is always a time of personal reflection and contemplation. A question I frequently find myself asking in the days and hours leading up to exams as I panickedly squish months upon months of complex content into my brain is: why am I like this? The answer?

Campus

AN EDUCATION | On Being Lost in the Murky Twilight Zone of Finals Week

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We’re in that strange twilight zone between the end of classes and going home: is it finals week or is it the end of all things looming? I couldn’t tell you how the time has been passing; all I know is that I wake up, work-work-work (or try, at least), forget to eat, get too tired to continue working, and go to bed at strange hours, the only constant in my life being the fact that I’m perpetually falling behind the rigorous study schedule I devised for myself in a last-ditch attempt to #savemysemester. And throughout all this, I’m counting the days until I can book it out of here and go home to a place more grounded in reality than this one. Perhaps I’m suffering from lack of structure. I’ve eaten two meals in the dining hall in the past week (RIP my unlimited meal plan), instead sustaining myself mostly on free coffee, mini marshmallows, and peanut butter banana sandwiches I make in the Cook house pantry at midnight.