Hogwarts, you can keep your owls at home because this piece of paper has made me happier than any wax-sealed acceptance letters you could send me. In case you can't read the line inside of the appropriately placed color wheel of arrows (yeah SMart major yeah), this letter confirms that I, Paulina Lopez, AM DONE WITH MY COMPS and can now proceed to enjoy the rest of my senior year at Kawlton. COMPS refers to Carleton students' undergrad thesis, which is supposed to represent the culmination of their education blah blah blah. At some point, I thought it was an acronym for something, but maybe I made that up.. Carleton's Ominous Misery Project for Seniors. Chronic Overt Miserable Person Syndrome. Can Only Make People Sob. Chill Out Man Please Son. Don't worry, I'll submit these to the dean.
The responsible, authorly thing to do at this point would be to show you the professional-quality pictures of my body of work and its accompanying artist statement. For now, suffice it to say that I made and wrote a bunch of things that speak to the processes of my memory. Also, I vaguely remember promising Ernesto that any artwork in my comps would be titled after Nickelback lyrics, so there's that.
At Carleton, it's really cool for people to martyrize themselves over their comps, which (depending on the major) can consist of super long exams, group research projects, 60 page papers, so on and so forth. There's a widely accepted 'It's not comps if you're not bleeding from every pore' mentality, which gets old pretty quickly for people who aren't compsing. I definitely complained too much about comps, but I felt justified because the entire process basically dunked me face-first in alternate buckets of ice and boiling water while pumping my blood with self-doubt and squeezing out any remaining drops of optimism. I don't even know. There were a lot of moments during this term when I felt like throwing all of my comps work into the Cannon River and Cannonballing (GEDDIT) in right after it. But I should be mature and recognize that comps pushed me to develop personally meaningful work of which I am moderately proud, etc. So.. come see my exhibit in May! Or maybe don't. All I actually want you to see are the following images, which portray what it feels like to have just passed comps and be done with this entire term:
