Five days into the new semester and we're feeling exhausted already, right? I swear that as early as Tuesday afternoon, I overheard kids in Moulton talking about parties on the weekend.
I think a lesson that we can learn from this premature burnout some seem to be experiencing is that as much as we may love Bowdoin and miss our school dearly over the long winter vacation, the rigors of Bowdoin academics are still enough to drive even the best of us up the proverbial wall.
A way to combat this sentiment that doesn't involve horrible consequences the following morning is simply to vary the typical Bowdoin schedule.
By freeing yourself from the semester's trends toward working too much and sleeping too little, you'll enjoy life a lot more every day, instead of only Thursday, Friday, and Saturday.
The Wilderness First Responder course that the Bowdoin Outing Club sponsors every January is an intense experience?there is no doubt about it.
The Wilderness Medical Associates is a national organization that oversees the certification of people in Wilderness First Aid, Wilderness EMT, and in the WFR course, and its members do not muck about.
The week was a bit like trying to drink water from a fire hydrant. They had us mastering CPR, assessing spinal injuries, delivering simulated babies, and fashioning improvised backboards, and that was just on the first day! After eight days of hard work, 27 of your Bowdoin classmates and I were all certified to be first-on-scene responders for almost any medical emergency in the wilderness or elsewhere.
In a way, the experience reminded me of what going to school at a place like Colorado College must be like. At CC, students are on a unique block-schedule, whereby a student takes just one course for about a four-week period. By the end of the year, they've taken as many class hours as any Bowdoin student, but just in a different arrangement. The WFR is a bit like that.
For eight days, we woke up at 7:00 a.m., went to class, and didn't come home again until almost 8:00 p.m. at night. It was cold outside and we were stuck in a classroom in Druck, but the intensity of my focus on this WFR class was really astounding.
I was so interested in it! We all were, I think. We were discussing the material at lunch, reviewing it together after dinner, and practicing it on 10-minute breaks. At some point we even began making all these jokes using only WFR terminology. To an outsider we must have seemed like those computer geeks in cartoons that always make jokes about their gigabytes? "Be careful on the ice, guys. We could fall and fracture our spine, thus creating the MOI for a cord injury. Hahaha."
Perhaps I'm making this course out to have been a very strange experience, and in some ways it was, but it was also a refreshing one.
After eight days with the same 27 people?cooking together, studying together, laughing at our hilarious instructors together?I not only felt like a person with a lot more knowledge about broken femurs and pulmonary edemas, but also like a person who had had more fun, made more connections, and learned more valuable lessons.
The class is offered at the end of each Winter Break by the BOC and is available to anyone. Members of the Outing Club's Leadership Training Program are all required to go through the WFR process, but it's also a great course for anyone to take and an underutilized opportunity for many Bowdoin kids.
The semester and its kinks are not disappearing, but keep an eye out for some alternatives to the grind. They helped me to get excited again to be at school, studying and learning and living.