1. You encounter the population of students who dwell in the lower levels of the library.

Adhering to the fast pace of WPI, students are required to study and work on course content daily in order to succeed. This concept can be taken with a grain of salt because if you’re good at scheduling you can keep your workload to a manageable level. The lower-level-library-dwellers are those students who are not so good at scheduling. Rumor has it that they pack a bag at the beginning of the term and live there for next 7 weeks. Now that it’s finals week, and the library is packed, we too are forced down into the dungenous floors to slowly degrade with our colleagues.

2. Students are asleep on floors and couches across campus.

This is an incredibly natural phenomenon seen at WPI. As most students walk home from the library in the early morning hours, they may decide to stop in a few of the academic buildings to visit the exhibits of the “Salisbury Lab Couches” or the “Fuller Labs Table-Beds”, where students are sure to be found passed out. I like to think of this as a sort of reward for concluding my studies for the night.

3. It's 4 A.M. and there's more people walking around campus than at mid-day.

It’s Wednesday night, which means a large proportion of the 6,700 students will be taking a final exam the next day. In order to pass, most students will be staying up all night in the library. By about 4:00 a.m. when we have all completely lost our minds we will begin to wander back to our houses and dorms. At this point we’re over-tired, which means we’re wide-awake, with zero cognitive functionality. It would be interesting to view and study the interactions of the 4:00 a.m. encounters between students. In fact, it may lead to groundbreaking discoveries in the language and communication styles of cavemen in the early centuries of our world.

This is finals week at WPI in a nutshell… and I wouldn’t want it any other way.