<p>After 4 years at UChicago, watching friends kill themselves over all-nighters and honors whatever while random football frat boys party hearty and don’t fail out, I have come to the following conclusion:</p>
<p>This school can actually be very easy, if you know what classes to take. The thing is, those classes are dull, and probably lead to some stupid major you’d never actually want to have. What we’ll all admit, although probably not on the most stress-ridden of pre-exam evenings, is this: we do it to ourselves, and we do it because we love it. The 30 hours a week on Honors Analysis alone, when I probably could have taken regular and gotten better grades with just 4-5 hours of work? Adored it. That time I had so many things due I only took half-hour naps for an entire week, and at the end of it discovered I’d <em>forgotten</em> how to sleep, waking (exhaustedly) automatically after 30 minutes for another week beyond that? It’s one of my most epic stories! We all complain about the workload, but we sign up for four courses a quarter when we’d only need three, take that advanced seminar when the second-year sequence would do, agonize at three in the morning over whether ‘acquire’ or ‘gain’ has the better feel for the conclusion of that Marx paper… and coo over our insights and knowledge, and excitedly share new facts over lunch, and drunkenly quote Durkheim at each other on the weekends, and push and push and love every freaking intense minute of it (well, ok, at least most minutes…). We do it to ourselves, because we’re passionate and intense and playful and inquisitive and maybe a little insane, because four years really is not all that much time at all and we want to squeeze every last drop of incredible lecture and involved discussion and intimate party out of it, while we still can, so we say yes when we should say no, take on too much, hang out another hour in the lounge when we should be studying, study another hour when we should be sleeping, and sometimes sleep another hour when we should be in class and then panickedly spend two hours trying to find anyone who understood what went on that we missed, when really those same kids will all be in the lounge to talk to again tomorrow, that last problem on the set isn’t going to get solved no matter how much sleep is missed, and if you’d just managed to calm down and think rationally you’d realize you could go talk to the TA for ten minutes at afternoon office hours instead of freaking out for half the day over what ended up just being a review lecture of stuff you already understood. And then we laugh about it, and tell it as a silly story at dinner, and do it all again next week. Because it’s fantastic, and we wouldn’t have it any other way.</p>
<p>… and I’m worried grad school is going to be easier than UChicago undergrad. And somehow, that’s disappointing.</p>