Just over eight months ago, I promised that I would write an Odyssey article after I had completed my Comprehensive Exams. Seeing as one of the obligations of being a Delt is to keep my commitments, and to be true to myself, I feel that it is not just appropriate, but necessary that I pen down some thoughts on how I'm feeling about it all.

I guess that I am also looking for some opportunity to open up. The past week has been more than a little stressful for me and my fellow seniors. Comps is a rigorous tradition that sets Wabash College apart from other institutions. We are demanded to not just demonstrate what we have learned in our respective fields, but to essentially define how those disciplines connect to each other in the liberal arts.

But let's get down to the chase. If you would indulge me, I would like to talk here about my own experience with Comps, and what it is beginning to mean to me.

First off, I am a triple major. Comps week, for me personally, was a period of character-building, pure and simple. Comps, as we all have figured out in our own ways, is about discipline, patience, and keeping your sanity while you are going crazy.

Even so, Comps, from the single majors to the nut jobs like me, is an intersectional experience of exertion and fatigue for Wabash Men.

However, I discovered along the way that Comps is a time when that shared sense of struggle brings you closer to your peers, if you let it. I found myself and others turning to our friends and acquaintances, within and across those disciplinary lines, for affirmation that we were going to get through it.

Even simple acknowledgments like a "Hey, Brand!" from a poli-sci major/football player I worked with in my Business and Tech Writing class last semester, or banter from my fellow English and History majors, meant a lot to me. They discouraged isolation, and I'm sure such interaction prevented many of us from just shutting down.

On another note, the "unexpected" can (and does) define the whole Comps experience. But this is especially true with Oral Comps.

I find it difficult to go into real detail about my own Orals experience last Thursday afternoon. This is because it still remains a blur to me, even now. I can only describe it as like being back in Moot Court all over again.

In my cynical view, Orals was not a conversation, but rather a cross-examination. I felt like I couldn't get out what I wanted to say. In my discussion of literary and historical analysis, I never once made a case as to my social and personal growth. My maturity as an individual is what has defined my Wabash experience, and that is something that those professors needed to hear the most.

I was hurt and confused after I came back from Orals. It took some real, back-to-earth coaching from one of those friends to wind me down from my disappointment with the experience, and with myself. He felt almost emphatically that I had done more than he could imagine. He also told me that I needed to simply recognize that we had made it together.

I will admit, here and now, that I did my darnedest to put on a game face throughout this week. But this means nothing to me now. To my peers who may sometimes give me too much credit: I am only human too. I went through this rite of passage with you. I had my struggles, as well as my small triumphs.

I am muddy; I am bruised, and you better believe that I am tired. But I am still in one piece. And I'm ready to get it done this semester, and so are the rest of us.

It is not over.