I've been out of college for almost a year now, thankfully working in my profession and not having to worry about pulling any all-nighters in the library studying or pulling together a paper that I've known about for months. I have, however, been able to live vicariously through the students of the college where the theatre that I work at resides, watching them having to go through what I did a year ago. Through working and through hands-on experience in college, I have noticed some similarities in my profession and in university.

In theatre, we have this thing called tech week.

Tech is when all the actors and designers of the production come together, see the show onstage for the first time, and work out all the kinks that need to be worked out before the show opens to the public. This gives the director a chance to fix the actors' movement onstage, gives the stage manager practice on calling the show (and the assistant stage manager practice on all of the hubbub that happens backstage), and gives the designers a chance to see what they need to add, fix, or get rid of before the show opens.

Needless to say, it's a bunch of people in one room trying to pull a show together in about a week. It's crazy. But, all that work pays off once the show opens because people see it and are wowed by how great everything is. If they only knew how much time was put into a show.

In college, there is a similar time known as finals week where all the college kids gather together in the library (or other places on campus) to study everything they've learned in an entire semester in a few nights time. This is a chance for every computer and study room in the library to be filled up and a time when you see students sleeping in yesterday's clothing under the comfort of the library computer desk.

It's a crazy time of year when there are copious amounts of highlighting and index cards, as well as discarded coffee cups and day old leftovers. Finals week tests a student's patience to see if they actually can study everything they need to, or give up and calculate what they need to score on the final in order to pass the class. It's actually a very sacred time in a college student's life.

The similarity between tech and finals week is the obvious stress factor of it all. Tech happens a week before a show opens and finals week also takes a week (or less) before an exam. There's probably the same amount of discarded coffee cups and leftover food lying about, and people in theatre have definitely pulled more all-nighters than they'd like to admit, much like college students prepping for finals.

Basically, if you decide to end up in theatre, you never actually leave that stress of finals week because it's always going to come back to haunt you once tech rolls around. You just don't have to worry about passing a class.