LAVINIA ZAINEA

Oral Examinations


     For most students, the most depressing moments are not the ones when they find themselves face-to-face with a piece of paper, answering a bunch of questions or discussing at length about some subject or another, but the moments they find themselves facing a much more difficult task: being forced to convey the information one might normally ponder over during some time in the course of a few minutes, under the close scrutiny of a professor or assistant.
     On the day of the oral examination, dozens of industrious students gather around a mystical door, behind which little pieces of paper await them holding questions they may or may not know how to answer. They stay in groups: there are the ones who want to finish quickly, either because they know everything, or because they don’t know anything, some of them holding class notes and books, with green and red annotations, frantically searching for some last minutes clarifications, while others are looking at said classes for the first time, calm or impatient, always carrying around a bottle of water and some biscuits; then, there are those who want to wait as much as possible, frightened at the thought of having to face such severe interrogators, not wanting to imagine the possibility of making even the smallest blunder.
    The subjects they address are diverse. While waiting, a sort of camaraderie ensues with the people around you. It doesn’t matter whether you’re friends or not in general, you are united by a common goal that day. A lot of energy is wasted trying to keep up one’s spirits, maintaining at arm’s length those who insist on reciting to you some chapter of some book, or trying to teach you their version of it. You have to doze your efforts in order to manage to smile politely, not collapse from sheer exhaustion after a few hours of waiting and participating in absurd discussions that would make Samuel Beckett bow in admiration. I, for one, spent one such fatidic day discussing the benefits of eating breakfast at 8 o’clock rather than 7 and the arguments against wearing blue outfits.
    Once you enter, you’re on your own. You read the questions, answer them to the best of your knowledge on a piece of paper, breathe deeply, get up, sit in front of the examinator, smile politely, try not to mumble, not to speak too fast or too slow, get your grade, face the facts and get out. Outside, you get assaulted by a curious mob you try to please to the best of your abilities, sigh in relief, tell them want they want to know, get away as fast as you can after imparting some of your wisdom, then you go outside with a cup of coffee to wait for some unfortunate friend who has yet to pass through the great challenge. You are free for now.