Trey Farley
tlf001@marietta.edu
(All names are fictional as well as any other pertinent information)
Finals week is one of the busiest and most difficult times of the year for any student at any college or university. Sometimes the hardest part of finals week is simply finding a place to study for all of those cumulative finals everyone loves. Some people prefer the comfort of their own rooms while others tend to leave their beds for the confines of a classroom to study in the room the exam will take place in. However, the most common study location is undoubtedly the library and Marietta College is no exception to this trend.
This is troublesome to the few real students who actually study at the library all year and struggle to find their usual spots during this week.
“These casuals come into my library once a semester and take up the study room I’ve lived in for the last 15 weeks” junior Fred Seagraves said. “They walk in with their coffee and spend the next few hours taking snapchats and making Instagram posts about how much they don’t want to study, it really grinds my gears.”
With many students sharing this sentiment it poses the question, why do these “academic hipsters” make the journey to the library for the sake of social media?
“If I don’t post pictures of me studying then did it really happen?” freshman Diane Walter said. “It’s the only real way to convince my family that I actually study when I’m at school and plus the posts get a lot of likes.”
More scientific inquiry will need to be conducted to see if social media approval correlates with higher test scores, but an educated person would assume with the number of people that participate in this phenomenon that there is clearly a positive correlation here.
So while you’re sitting at a desk in the library with your books open and staring at your notes remember you have two options. You could actually try that whole studying thing and risk your whole semester’s work or take the safe route and take as many selfies as humanly possible to ensure your professor sees them and rewards your efforts with that desired A+.
