It's currently 1:42 a.m. on Sunday and I'm taking a quick break from homework to write this column. I'm only four pages into the 40 I have due over the next week and a half and already my brain hurts. Thanksgiving was just a nice illusion of the relaxation that will come after finals. It's a long way to go.

So many people freak out over finals week, particularly freshmen who haven't taken them before in college, but I say the last two weeks before finals are the worst. With finals all you usually have to do is study for the test, which may or may not be cumulative, and then take it.

If you are spending more than four hours studying for a final, then you are probably screwed anyway because you don't know the material.

Granted you may have one final right after another, which makes things that much worse, but at least it doesn't consume weeks of your life like the two weeks prior. It's like all the professors get together into some kind of cabal and figure out a way to make sure all papers, projects and lab reports fall into some kind of perfect storm of scheduling to annihilate any kind of breathing room you have.

Raynor and Memorial Libraries are at capacity as usual, but just about any other quiet space on campus will be taken as well.

I wish I could say there are some majors exempt from this nightmare, but as far as I know, everyone is in the same boat in some way or another.

Liberal arts majors such as myself are inundated with enough writing to make an engineer run away screaming. There's nothing like several 15-page research papers due at roughly the same time to consume your life. And it's not even the writing that is so mind numbing, but the hours upon hours of research that is so tedious.

Business and communication majors do not necessarily have the same workload in terms of writing but they have their own special hell waiting for them. Many of my friends have several group projects due soon, which, as my predecessor so elegantly put, is where learning goes to die. I'd take writing a paper over having to do the academic equivalent of herding cats any day.

Group work is like an educational version of "Survivor" except not as entertaining and less substantive. My hat is off to anyone who can stand that without knifing someone.

I'm not really sure if the last two weeks are any different for nursing students and engineers, but if they are anything like the rest of the year, they still probably suck.

So how do you survive this ordeal while still maintaining some kind of life?

The answer is you don't.

You just let the library swallow you whole and you slave away at the work. It seems like an oxymoron, but you just turn your brain off and do the work. Try not to think about how much left you have to do and simply plug away.

Coffee or Mountain Dew will be indispensable during these next few weeks and if you know a nurse who could simply hook you up to an IV full of one or the other, it would make things even easier.

Avoid the yayo though, you may be focused and awake for hours on end, but the paranoia and possibility of arrest outweigh any positives. Save it for Tony Montana and go with Adderall if you must.

By the time this trial by fire and classes are over, finals will seem like a breeze.