The lecture theatre is too bright. The lecturer is droning on about some abstract concept, I’m not sure he’s using real words anymore: “orthogonal array” and “Ziegler-Nichol’s tuning”. I didn’t get enough sleep last night; I was up ‘till the wee hours of the morning finishing an assignment, another round of psychological trauma assigned for no other reason than to make us suffer – “it gives you character” the lecturer claims.

I zone back in, the last hour has been a blur. “And remember the test next week, anything less than a 50% and we take your first born” the lecturer says as we pack up our books. My notebook is conspicuously empty, I wasn’t present enough to get anything down. I couldn’t even tell you which lecture I just sat through.

10:48 a.m. I’m in the library.

My head is pounding. My eyes feel as if they are full of sand. My mind is wandering, hoping to be distracted from the formulas and variables glaring at me through the screen. This is what 10 minutes of 3rd year engineering study has done to me. The boys around me are searching for any escape they can, and have settled on swiping endlessly, anything to avoid thinking about the impending doom of the 11:59 p.m. deadline. I’m determined not to meet the same fate, but my hand is already sneaking into my bag, feeling around for my phone. I don’t even realise until it’s too late. Suddenly I’ve wasted 15 minutes down an Instagram scroll-hole. I manage to crawl my way back to reality and get back to the grind. We’ve been assigned what feels like an impossible problem. I could figure it out, I could work through the problem, or I could check what my mate did and copy that. I think I’ll do the latter… Cheating isn’t ethical until the assignment is due, and I haven’t even looked at it yet.

1:12 p.m. My electric motors lab.

The safety glasses squeeze my head. They are scratched and distort my vision. The world is a funhouse mirror, but that might just be the sleep deprivation. We are attempting to decipher the lab manual, it’s telling us something about the current and voltage. Blah blah blah. We’ll figure it out as we go and hope for the best. Within 5 minutes we’ve already blown our first motor and are struggling to get the software to work, I vote we call it a day and head home, but my friends won’t let me. After finally managing to get it to work right, and collecting some data, we realise there is a problem: It looks horrendous. We definitely can’t use that for the report. Now’s my chance to sweet talk some of the other groups to send us their data, “it’s just to compare our data” I lie, but they see right through it. I remind them of the math assignment I shared with them last week and they fold. Welcome to the black market of assignment sharing.

11:47 p.m. My room.

I’m staring blankly at my far-too-blue screen. If anyone was watching, all they would see is a zombie, empty behind the eyes, sitting lifelessly at it’s desk. This was prompted by the 9-thousand-word report due this Sunday. I am resisting the urge to ask my dear friend ChatGPT to help. It would be so easy, but I refuse to stoop that low. Time to scrounge up record levels of bullshit and do my best to make it convincing. But, for now, it’s time to close the laptop and sit in the dark for 10 minutes, my head in my hands, questioning why I willingly made the decision to put myself through this. It’s almost sadistic.

With my allowance of 10 minutes of despair over, it’s time to hit the sack, and do it all again tomorrow. I love engineering.