Everyone has either experienced -- or at least heard of -- the dreaded college finals week. Finals week is every college student's worst nightmare. Some would say that it is death or even hell itself. During finals week your life gets turned upside down. No one is ever sure that they will survive it, though they usually do. Well, at least that's the case if you go to a normal college or university. But life at a performing arts conservatory like AMDA is exactly the opposite.
While everyone else has only one week of extreme stress and hell, we here at AMDA have 12. Finals week at a traditional school is a week of all-nighters. Cramming. Sleep deprivation. Poor eating habits. Caffeine reliance. Utmost exhaustion. Losing your mind. The list, I'm sure, could go on and on. But for us, that is the first 12 out of 15 weeks of our semester. Especially third semester.
We spend roughly 12 weeks slaving over our work. Constantly memorizing, rehearsing, agonizing, crying, quitting, not sleeping. We are awake at ungodly hours in order to rehearse because it's the only time we can manage to find available studio space to use. We wait outside the school early in the morning before the building even opens or stay late at night until the building closes just to rehearse. Because we cannot do very much of our work by ourselves on our own time. Majority of the time we have scene partners to work with whose schedules we must work around, as well as our own. We work our asses off for months, the workload impossibly unbearable. We don't know that we will ever make it through to the end of the semester.
But the next thing we know, just as quickly as the whole thing started, the end has come. We get to the last week or two and everything seems to kind of slow down. We have done all of this work in the past few months to prepare for our finals. Now it's time to use the last couple of weeks to polish up our final demonstrations.
Week 13 is over and our classes are officially done for the semester. Our last two weeks are our final demonstrations. And unlike finals week at your standard college, our final demo weeks are the most chill weeks of our semester. We typically have only one or two demos per day and the rest of the day is ours. This is, surprisingly, probably the least stressful time of our semester. Everything is wrapping up, the semester coming to an end. You perform the things you've been working on for the last few weeks in front of your teachers and fellow classmates and you're done.
Then we are free to use our time as we please. That means as much Netflix, sleep, food, exploring, and relaxing as we want. Well, that is, until we have to do it all over again next semester.
