The exam weeks are here.

The blinking LED lighting in innovationSpace suggests that behind its windows, the Matrix building has something cheerful to offer, but the cold lighting in the other buildings is much more representative of the now pervasive collective, clinical depression. Meta has become North Brabant's biggest pig farm. Here, screens are stared at with even less joie de vivre than can be found in its animal-filled equivalent.

The exam weeks are here.

This time there are six exams. All in the first week of course. Including three resits, and Physics for the fifth time. Evidently, parabolic trajectories are too complex for our simple minds. To the distant sleep-inducing sound of practice exams being printed off, you wait for an email from the professor - it'll never come - while a deadline hangs over your head like the hangman's noose. Seems like high time for a rita.

The exam weeks are here.

They wander the deserted floors, not going far, the lost students looking for a safe place to burst into tears. You're doing it for yourself, you know. Don't forget that, eh? It's fun, isn't it? That's why you're doing it. Your parents expect grades, society wants a certificate. One burn-out more or less, what difference does it make?

The exam weeks are here.

Those dumb Industrial Designers, those guys who don't have any exams, are having snowball fights and rolling snowbodies. That long-forgotten fun. Yet only last week they were acting like they had it tougher than any of us. Their lives were hanging by a prototype, its LEDs blinking, and they were trying to hold their disintegrating group projects together with duct tape.

The exam weeks are here.

Another new day has dawned. Another early morning in the train between the 9-to-5 foot soldiers. They say a single beer before an exam is good for the nerves, as long as it's a triple. Travel delay. Just too late, stumbling along the endless rows of tables, you realize you've forgotten the most important thing: your student card. And suddenly, you want nothing more than to be as old as the exam invigilators, on course for those gilded years of retirement.

The exam weeks are here.

After ten minutes the first brave souls leave the hall. What courage! Another 170 minutes of sighing and audible suffering. With the scratching of pens, the sheets of A4 are filled. After which Simon - like an excited first-year - says to you that it was okay. God only knows if what Simon says is right.

The exam weeks are here.

Then you get back to your bike and find it's got a flat tire. The world is out to get you and you're going down. When you're finally on your way, a Mercedes cuts you up as it drives into the BunkerToren parking garage. Growling at the old white driver, you cycle on until you get to your room. Which, by the way, you now can't afford because you sacrificed every hour of your student job to piece together some extra time to study physics. Hold on just a little longer. Then we can go to Thailand, or some other random place. And never come back to this place with its exorbitant student debt, killer stress, and deadening cold.

The exam weeks are here.