The only time during the semester when it’s safe to say midterm season is over is now: the two-week scramble and tumble into Reading Week is all about a different kind of stress. The Sunday-before-a-midterm scaries turn into Wednesday-before-my-evil-Thursday-final scaries. Once-a-week seminars end anticlimactically, and lectures conclude with applause. We’ve entered a new phase of life at Yale, distinct from the rest of the semester. It’s the final push to freedom.
Midterm season at Yale feels interminable, because it is. Apart from the introductory first couple weeks in September, practically the whole semester is “midterm season.” There’s no use in defining it with a start and end date. As the days grow shorter and the air gets colder, our collective academic misery worsens. We are at the mercy of our professors, glued to rubrics and textbooks, our fates determined by however generous their grading will be. At the end of the day, midterms are just versions of assessments we’ve all been taking for years. The distinct pain of them comes from pressure to “do well”—usually defined by grades—and the stress born as a result.
Stress culture at Yale is multifaceted. Its downside is comparison, while its upside is solidarity. The mental gymnastics goes something like this: the more crammed your GCal, the more successful you are, the more on top of your shit you are, the more you’re squeezing out of your short, four-year Yale experience. With a full GCal, there’s nothing more I could be doing. My life is full, even if stress is what fills the space. There might not be much room to breathe, but at least I can go about my day without worrying about what I am not doing. The GCal Olympics can be a solo game or a group activity, but it’s horrendous either way. Hourslong empty chunks on the GCal should be a welcomed time—to do nothing, or to do anything else. We all need a little bit of unstructured, undirected time in our lives.
Being realistic, though, even with free time in my schedule during the semester, and especially right now, schoolwork tends to fill in the gaps. The upside of stress culture is that it’s a culture: none of us are in this alone. It’s reassuring, comforting even to be in the trenches with friends. We’re all in this together, all trying to learn something, do our best, and make the most of our time here—and that looks different for everyone. There’s no right way to do Yale.
Midterms and assessments are a fact of life. Stress is here to stay, too. One thing we can do is cancel the illusory “midterm season” and its grip. One of my friends recently said, “You’re in a place you dreamed of being, surrounded by people who love you.” We are more than midterms and papers and finals and presentations. Being here at Yale is about more than the stress of academics. When we convince ourselves of that, maybe we can carve out some joy in the stress.
