Maddie Smiley

During each morning of my first spring finals week as a student at Wake, I took my backpack and a blanket and staked out a chair in the 24-hour room of Z. Smith Reynolds Library. The 24-hour room is a magical place with cozy recliners, vending machines, and printers – and it never closes, even when the rest of campus goes quiet.

I exiled myself from my residence hall during the day so that the students swirling frantically all around the library could hold me accountable to be productive. Like a hero on a journey (finals week), I just had to complete a few quests (finals) and then I could go home (Babcock Residence Hall). And like any hero in a story, I had to encounter a few key allies during my journey to help me get back home.

The first of these allies were the librarians. During New Deac (Orientation) Week, we learned that the librarians each have various research specializations and can be called upon for help with finding valuable sources. In high school, I always tried to navigate research alone, but when I came to college, I really wanted to improve my research capabilities. After a team of librarians took me through a couple of databases and helped me track down some excellent articles for my paper on Western European politics, I was ready for my next quest.

Later in the week, I ventured out of the comfort of my blanket and the 24-hour room to meet with an English professor I had the previous fall, with the goal of having him read a final essay I was working on and validate all of the hours I had spent reading American Suburban Gothic novels for my First-Year Seminar. Instead, he effectively tore it apart. He gently but rigorously pointed out all of the actionable ways I could improve my argument, and I trusted his advice because I knew he trusted my writing to be better. I went back to my recliner in the 24-hour room and rewrote large chunks of the paper before submitting it. 

It was almost time for dinner on the night before my last exam – German Short Fiction – and I was burnt out. I felt fine about the actual content of the exam, but I was exhausted from the week and just needed to fast-forward to the end of finals. As I left the 24-hour room to trudge to the dining hall, I got a text from a friend in that German class. She was struggling to keep some of the characters’ names straight and wanted to talk through them over dinner with some of our other classmates. Our little troop ended up talking at the dining hall – about German book characters and other things – until it closed that night. 

Each finals week still feels like a hero’s journey, to be honest, but it’s the kind of journey where everything falls perfectly into place to help the hero get home safely. If there were 300 students in that first-year English class as opposed to 14, I don’t think my professor would have been able to provide such amazing personalized feedback on my essay. If the librarians at Wake didn’t enjoy their work and helping students, my research on that politics paper would not have gone so well. If Wake’s community was more competitive instead of collaborative, I’m not sure my classmates and I would have been about to encourage one another like we did on that night before our exam. Thinking about finals as quests or tribulations started almost as a means of self-pity, but with all of the empowerment I find at Wake Forest, it’s not hard to feel like a hero by the end of the journey.