Seniors here have to complete a Comprehensive Exercise (a senior thesis or similar project) commonly referred to as “comps.” Each major has it’s own rules and deadlines, but today was Comps Day for Econ majors. It was so fun to see them going up to the printer to collect their impressively long papers with impressively long titles and just glowing!
Most of these kids haven’t slept in about 3 weeks, they’ve been stressed to the hilt producing a paper that’s several times longer than anything they’ve ever produced before, and their graduations hang in the balance over this one project. But today they’re bursting with so much joy and so much pride that they just spontaneously come up the desk, show me their papers, and say, in wonder, “This is my comps!”
So between finding information about Korean assimilation into Japanese corporate culture, sussing out good starting points for a paper on the effects of globalization on education in inner-city Chicago high schools, and a whole bunch of citation questions for one class that has a project due tomorrow, I got to congratulate a steady stream of dazedly ecstatic Econ seniors and promise them that yes, they’ll be even happier tomorrow after they’ve eaten something and slept a little.