[6-9; 394-403; 428-444] In winter of 2018, we were finishing up the hardest semester so far. So, my third semester, and as final exams were coming, I ended up not sleeping for 52 hours in order to finish everything, and so that was probably the worst part of engineering in the past two years. I realized that I need to go to counseling, and I need to talk to the engineering professors and say, hey, this is a problem. You cannot put any other class through what we went through because that is insane. It’s different if one person was having issues and debating things that shouldn’t be debated about themselves, but if the entire class was having issues, I’m like, “It’s not an entire class of people who are struggling mentally.” It was the classes problem.
So I was able to talk to my professor about the problem because I attend a small school. I was able to go into my professor’s offices and say, “Each of you have assigned major things that are due this week.” I know some of those are hard deadlines because we have people coming from other companies to come to [our university] and judge us on our poster presentation. Since the external judges tell us what they think of how our engineering program is doing, we were unable to negotiate the due date. However, other assignments like take-home exams, and large homework assignments that did not need to be scheduled that week were rescheduled. So, I was able to negotiate with my professor and say, “Hey can you move this deadline to a couple days from now? Then hopefully I’ll be able to get it done by the original deadline. But it just gives us the opportunity to put it off for a little bit and spread things out more evenly.” So I guess being able to negotiate with my professors and work with them helps me navigate the low points of the semester. I knew that they would do that. So that was comforting, and then realizing that I made it through last semester so I can do this.