Finals week is the difficult roadblock between the end of school and the beginning of the blissful winter break. However, becoming increasingly more difficult is the week before finals, known as dead week, but for Washburn and other universities the term “dead week” can mean two different things.

For some, it can mean a time to think about the finals one is about to take. For others, it can be the hellacious marathon that requires sprinting just to stay with the pack. Students employ varying stimulants to ensure there are enough hours in the day to complete the assignments required during the last week of finals. Exhaustion and incredible stress wreak havoc on even the most organized student body.

Dead week is anything but dead at Washburn.

I appreciate the efforts on the part of the Washburn Student Government Association and the library staff to make the week before finals more bearable, but this is a plea to the administration and faculty help make dead week more bearable. Of course, I do not have a terminal degree in anything. I do not even have an undergraduate degree completed yet, but as a student who has a blood-Mountain Dew level of at least 0.8, I feel qualified to speak in regard to the workload during dead week.

Washburn needs to have more of a quiet, study time dead week. Professors could make large, final assignments due no later than Wednesday during the week before finals so students would have more time to study for their actual finals. Some skeptics might say that this would just give students more time to procrastinate, but really, this would give the students who care about their university education more time to both produce quality work and study for finals effectively.

Also, this would stop the rampant spread of the sniffles everyone gets because they are sleep-deprived and eating foul McDonald’s food at 2 a.m.

Factually, this might be unsound, but most of the students I have spoken to about this have to choose between sleep, going to class, studying or writing papers. They have not figured out how to do all four at once, which is what seems like is required of them during dead week. If they had at least two days where all they had to do was go to class and wrap up the semester, they could have more time for a relaxed, concentrated study of knowledge that might actually stick around after the final break.

The decreased stress level would do a lot for the worth of finals, and it would probably do a lot for relationships across campus, as stress generally makes people extraordinarily irritable.

Students have gotten into the habit of consuming information and then regurgitating it all over blue books for their finals. This two-day break would allow students to absorb some of the information professors have worked hard throughout the semester to impart to students.

Merging the ideas of a stress relief week and the few days of class and studying would help students immensely. This does not mean this column is an advocate of making assignments or finals less difficult, but requiring a different timeline would make a world of difference. The students who care will be able to perform to their full abilities and the students who do not care will still not study and still turn in bad material.

Excuse me while I finish my espresso, and I will see you all in the library this week.