Dakota Phillips

Judgment day is coming: the time you gather your strength, muster your materials and ingest copious amounts of coffee.

This unholy fury is one of many ways man has devised to demoralize his future competition. I feel it’s a cop-out to test your knowledge and mastery of a subject based on memorizing more of the textbook. Life never came with a textbook, but its tests are every single day. In a perfect world there shouldn’t be a master test.

One’s worth to society shouldn’t be summed up in a GPA or a score on a paper. It comes from the earned respect of peers, the love of friends and family, and the little inherent things you can’t learn in a classroom. I sound like a hokey Robin Williams, but this is true.

The existing structure of weighing a student’s worth is crap; shaping your future is a number. It’s a leftover from the factory lifestyle: educating the middle class enough to work in factories. Only now, the institutes are factories manufacturing students. I bet you could even imagine your time in college as a conveyor belt of classes; unless you were too drunk to remember, of course.

Now, rather than being known by word-of-mouth and a testimony of experiences, you’re judged by multiple choices and essays.

In this one chance you could literally make or break your future: A semester’s worth of hard work is able to be undone by a sleepless night of procrastination and video games.

Oh, those sweet feelings of carelessness.

That reminds me of what lies ahead. Just beyond the academic Armageddon is the sweetness of summer. I’ve come to know summer –– not just for its freedom –– but for the changes it brings upon me.

I go through more changes and grow more as a person in the summer. It’s something like self-help on steroids. I find myself in critical situations that push me to my limits.

Summer’s like an island in an ocean or an oasis in a desert. It’s the time where I truly shine; its real life. Stay behind the walls of academia and you’ll forget what you went away to learn for.

Unless there’s some major social change, we’ll have to consider finals as here to stay. They aren’t fun, but most things worthwhile in life aren’t.

On that note, I urge you to go that extra mile: bunker down, excommunicate yourself, do whatever necessary to ensure your head stays above water. Invest in the now; just because the system is flawed and full of crap doesn’t entail procrastination. Do the hard work now, if for nothing else, because your future is worth it.

In a related story, I met my future self. I use that term loosely, as he introduced himself by punching me in the face.