100 days.
I thought I’d share info on the 100 Days Project, which actually started on Monday and it lasts for 100 days, which is longer than you have to do your thesis (officially), BUT you might benefit from the resources and from having a sense of being a part of a larger community of people striving to complete creative projects.
As you may remember form being an underclassperson, the last part of the Spring semester is a crazy time for Seniors at Bryn Mawr, or for most of them, anyway. Customarily, people move into their carrels and spend all their waking hours there. Writing. Reading. Revising. Writing. Or they move into the common room: rehearsing, inventing, revising, rehearsing. It’s an intense time and friends worry about each other and bring each other food and, it’s true, some lean into the “drama” a little heavy and, it’s also true, some are not actually getting as much thesis done as they are signaling that they are stressed, but all in all, it’s a cracklingly focused community that draws a lot of fortitude from the fact that almost everyone is doing this.
My Senior year was no different. I was in this honors program at Swarthmore and the way it worked was this: for the last two years, you took 4 classes and 6 2-credit seminars. You got grades in the classes, which were mostly finishing your requirements or taking things you were tangentially interested in, but the seminars were ungraded. And they were hard and intense. (The Shakespeare Seminar, required for English Majors, had the requirement that you read ALL the plays BEFORE you took the seminar.) And at the end of your Senior year, they hired in these outside examiners, experts in the field, to give exams for each seminar. So you had to take these 6 4-hour long tests...a written session and then an oral session...and if you failed those, you might not graduate. So there was a LOT of pressure, but we all worked together, mostly, in study groups, to try to master all this hard material. And we talked about work as we ate. And we slept next to our books. It was intense.
And I learned so much. It was accidental but inevitable that what you were reading in one seminar would start to impact how you were thinking about another seminar and you would use, say, existentialist philosophy on your modern drama seminar exam and use examples from modern drama to make points in your critical theory exam. And there was this terrific sense of camaraderie, even among people who didn’t much care for one another.
The four of you can be that for one another, on a small scale. You can challenge one another, give feedback to one another, share with one another. And with the 100 days crowd, if you want it, you can have a broader experience of being a creative person with a creative project cooking. And you can follow other people’s work and share your own.
If I could wish a thing for you, it’s that you can have the sense of really seeing your projects all the way through. To see yourself make something, to share it, hear feedback and then revise it. There’s so much to learn in that process. And it’s there for you if you want it.
As you may remember form being an underclassperson, the last part of the Spring semester is a crazy time for Seniors at Bryn Mawr, or for most of them, anyway. Customarily, people move into their carrels and spend all their waking hours there. Writing. Reading. Revising. Writing. Or they move into the common room: rehearsing, inventing, revising, rehearsing. It’s an intense time and friends worry about each other and bring each other food and, it’s true, some lean into the “drama” a little heavy and, it’s also true, some are not actually getting as much thesis done as they are signaling that they are stressed, but all in all, it’s a cracklingly focused community that draws a lot of fortitude from the fact that almost everyone is doing this.
My Senior year was no different. I was in this honors program at Swarthmore and the way it worked was this: for the last two years, you took 4 classes and 6 2-credit seminars. You got grades in the classes, which were mostly finishing your requirements or taking things you were tangentially interested in, but the seminars were ungraded. And they were hard and intense. (The Shakespeare Seminar, required for English Majors, had the requirement that you read ALL the plays BEFORE you took the seminar.) And at the end of your Senior year, they hired in these outside examiners, experts in the field, to give exams for each seminar. So you had to take these 6 4-hour long tests...a written session and then an oral session...and if you failed those, you might not graduate. So there was a LOT of pressure, but we all worked together, mostly, in study groups, to try to master all this hard material. And we talked about work as we ate. And we slept next to our books. It was intense.
And I learned so much. It was accidental but inevitable that what you were reading in one seminar would start to impact how you were thinking about another seminar and you would use, say, existentialist philosophy on your modern drama seminar exam and use examples from modern drama to make points in your critical theory exam. And there was this terrific sense of camaraderie, even among people who didn’t much care for one another.
The four of you can be that for one another, on a small scale. You can challenge one another, give feedback to one another, share with one another. And with the 100 days crowd, if you want it, you can have a broader experience of being a creative person with a creative project cooking. And you can follow other people’s work and share your own.
If I could wish a thing for you, it’s that you can have the sense of really seeing your projects all the way through. To see yourself make something, to share it, hear feedback and then revise it. There’s so much to learn in that process. And it’s there for you if you want it.
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