When it happens, you know that you’ll tell your kids the story someday — or if booze is involved, your drinking buddies at happy hours when trading old college memories.
Your finals week story of triumph or failure. The time you found yourself into a caffeine-induced, heart-exploding panic and either somehow, magically, pulled off a passing grade or lost all hope altogether, passing out right on top of your textbook.
Before finals week this year, we searched campus for the most legendary stories of them all.
‘A couple beers’
Ian Loughney had an offer to go to a get-together at his buddy’s house on the Friday night of finals week this past spring. It was one last chance to see his friends before the summer — enjoy a beer or two.
One problem: his last final, Renaissance Art, was Saturday morning. He was going back home on Sunday, too, so he couldn’t go out Saturday night.
“I was like, ‘Alright, it’s fine. I’ll go over there, I’ll have a couple beers, I won’t get too crazy. I can come home after it, and I’ll study a bit. I’ll go to bed and wake up for my final,’” Loughney said. “It seems like everyone who’s ever said that — that just does not happen. That plan went to sh** so quick.”
Loughney doesn’t remember much from that night, but by 9:30 p.m., he somehow made his way to Carnegie Mellon University’s campus, waking up in a stranger’s room somewhere on Fifth Avenue in Shadyside about an hour before his final started. He didn’t even have a pencil.
Incredibly, he booked it down Fifth, bought a pencil at 7-Eleven and made his way toward the Frick Fine Arts building. Midway through identifying famous paintings and sculptures on Powerpoint slides, his stomach turned.
“I’m halfway through it, and I’m like, ‘Oh, no,'” he said.
Loughney pushed his way past his TA and professor standing at the door, stumbled into the bathroom and barfed in a toilet, the classroom close enough that his instructors heard just about everything. They must’ve thought he was actually ill, because the teachers asked if he needed more time.
He ended up pushing through and finishing the test — one of the instructors told him they’d go easy on the grading — and he saw a “B” on MyPitt the next week.
“While it was happening, I was like, ‘Wow, this is the worst thing that’s ever happened to me,'” he said. “But afterward, I just thought it was funny.”
The Donut Guy
If you’re feeling anxious or upset before an exam or just need a pick-me-up, you might be in luck — the Donut Guy could be in your class.
During his first year at Pitt, before an exam for Biology 1 — a class famous for weeding out those entering the pre-med track — Travis Slopek figured he’d buy three dozen pastries from Dunkin’ Donuts and share them with his classmates.
“I did it on a whim because it was a tough class — because, you know, who doesn’t like donuts?” Slopek said.
Slopek, now a senior psychology major, has since dished out treats before approximately 30 tests, mostly for hard-to-pass science classes. He said most of his peers are surprised when he walks into a midterm or final, boxes stacked high in his hands — they expect him to ask for money for the food. Slopek’s motivations are much simpler than that.
“They asked me why I did it, and I was like, ‘Well, it’d be really cool if someone did this for me,’” he said. “I’d be pretty happy if I came to my Bio 1 or Organic Chemistry or whatever horrible science class we were doing and just gave a little something like, ‘Hey, everything’s gonna be cool, we’re gonna make it through. Enjoy a donut — you’ve made it this far.’”
Sleeping in
Cailin Grey had a sociology final from 10 to 11 a.m. — nothing too hard, she thought — but when she woke up and looked at the time, the clock read 11.
Grey, now a senior finance major, threw on a pair of sweatpants and ran out the door, heading to her professor’s office in Posvar. Sweating and out of breath, Grey found her teacher, who was gracious and let her take the final anyway.
But that wasn’t her biggest embarrassment of the day. When Grey returned to her Holland Hall dorm and looked in the mirror, she remembered what she used for acne treatment the night before.
“I recently read that if you break out, toothpaste can help dry out breakouts,” Grey said, “so I put toothpaste on that night. And I didn’t even think to look in the mirror before I left.”
Then it hit her: the stares on her way to Posvar, the pity in her teacher’s face at the office. Grey sported a mask of toothpaste the entire morning.
“It was funny, and everything worked out OK,” she said. “But it’s not something that you want to happen.”
The Study Bomb
During his junior year Organic Chemistry class, Darik O’Neil — a senior neuroscience, philosophy and psychology triple major — just couldn’t relate to the way his professor taught the material.
So he put the class on the back burner after he passed the midterm with the intention of self-teaching the material in Hillman during each lecture. But temptation got the best of him, and he ignored the class and waited until 72 hours before the final exam to learn the material.
“I know this: I’m gonna have to literally not sleep until this final,” O’Neil said.
Thinking of Peter’s Pub’s famous drink, the Panther Bomb — which involves dropping a shot of blue liqueur into a glass of Red Bull — O’Neil filled up a protein shaker with pre-workout mix, then dropped a 5-Hour Energy into it. He called it the Study Bomb.
Fidgeting from the high caffeine dosage, O’Neil locked himself in Hillman Library for 48 hours with only a few short naps throughout the two-day period. About a day in, O’Neil claims he started hallucinating, seeing nonexistent movement from the corner of his eye. People started asking him questions.
“The guard that goes around [Hillman], he knows me at this point. I’ve been here, I’ve been fidgeting for a while,” he said. “He just asked me, ‘You alright, man?'”
Fortunately for O’Neil, the marathon cramming session earned him a A on the Organic Chemistry final — roughly two letter grades above the curve. Following the jittery, hallucinatory nightmare, he vowed to never have another experience like that again, and he hasn’t missed a STEM lecture since.
“Sometimes, now I see the freshmen or sophomores falling out. I’m like, ‘Hey man, you ever try a Study Bomb?'” he said. “I don’t know if any of them have ever taken me up on that, but it does work.”