Being a senior means business, serious business—and funny business. There is this thing called a tutorial to take care of, meetings to hold, clubs to be officers of. You have to put on your respectable face, give the underclassmen something to look up to. You have to dress well, show up for class on time, and get the best grades you ever got.

Well aware of all this, I woke up at seven a.m. on the first day of my senior year (even though I didn’t have class until noon). I looked out the window of my little room in Laughlin to the dewy treetops and made the first cup of coffee of the year. I had just, only two weeks before, come back from studying Arabic in Egypt all summer, and was feeling on top of the world. I was going to take on the next level Arabic at full-swing, I was going to get my tutorial started, I was going to be so ahead of the game in everything this year.

Enter into First-Year Science. Being a transfer student, I haven’t gotten around to taking a science yet, and so I find myself, three days a week, sitting in the basement of Buhl, trying to wrap my brain around mitosis and the parts of the cell. On Tuesdays I am often found with a furrowed brow, attempting to make what little sense I can of the intricate universe of Microsoft Excel.

Then, of course, there’s Arabic (nothing is ever as easy as it seems). For much of our first week, my fellow Arabic students and I found ourselves without an instructor, without a class time to attend at all. We spent the first few days jumping from office to office, email to email, trying to get our class under way. With only four to five interested students, getting a teacher and time and place configured had become an epic saga. By Wednesday, we were in the dean’s office, pleading our case before an understanding, if slightly bewildered Dean Skleder. By Thursday, alhamdu’allah, our voices had been heard and we were speaking Arabic by the mid-afternoon.

Enter The Tutorial. In the spring of my junior year, I thought I had planned well. I had my foot in the door, my toes in the water, and my head in the game, but when the time rolled around, I wasn’t sure I was ready. My topic, a post-colonial analysis of the novel The Map of Love, by Ahdaf Soueif, seemed somewhat dry and, although I was excited about having been to Egypt, I had already drilled into a new well of other new and exciting ideas. But I was stuck, and really, this was for the best. After what was essentially freaking out, I made peace with my topic, and have, in fact, developed a new interest in it. With further research, I found that the author herself has written a batch of non-fiction which supports my analysis of her novel, and have been riding high ever since.

Let the literary games begin.