Student Blog: A Streetcar Named Finals- The Last Week of the Semester

Being a theater lighting student is hard to explain to family and friends who haven’t gone through the same version of finals as you have. No grandma, I don’t have a math test. Yes, I have load-in from 9am-6pm. The hours are weird, the assignments are different from a non-theater major, and I don’t exactly have “tests” like everyone else. Instead, I was loading in our Light Lab Final, working on my Vectorworks homework, or battling with my scenic final, obsessing over the scale and depth of it. 

My point is, college theater isn’t always the most understandable to everyone I know. It’s sometimes even hard for me to get my family to understand I’m not an actor. But oddly enough, finals week made me realize something really important. 

Was I stressed? Absolutely. But it wasn’t the same kind of stress I used to associate with finals—quiet rooms, sharpened pencils, and multiple-choice questions that somehow always had two “correct” answers depending on how the professor was feeling that day. 

Theater finals are louder. They move. They take up space. Instead of sitting in an exam hall, I was climbing ladders, checking cable runs, and trying to figure out where channel 301 was since it was just floating on my channel hookup. There’s a very specific kind of panic that comes from loading weight, reaching across the air holding what seems like the 8-millionth brick with everyone waiting for you to finish.

And yet, somewhere in the chaos, there’s a strange kind of clarity.

Theater finals are a lot more human than anything else I’ve experienced academically. Live feedback during presentations, open criticism in front of my peers, watching my work be critiqued by industry professionals, it all seemed worse than a pencil and paper final at first. But as I moved through it, it became a lot more of a conversation than a grade to me. Sure, I was still getting a grade, but it felt more like an open discussion than a number to me. In a strange way, it felt like Blanche’s line in A Streetcar Named Desire: “I don’t tell the truth, I tell what ought to be truth.” In lighting, that doesn’t feel dishonest—it feels familiar. You’re constantly shaping how something is seen, deciding what the audience is meant to feel rather than just what is technically there. I decided to lean on this during my finals. 

Unlike a traditional exam, there isn’t always a clean end where you close a booklet and walk out feeling either victorious or defeated. Sometimes your final is still debating over cues with your group, or it’s stepping back five feet from an art piece and realizing the thing you spent days perfecting looks completely different than what I wanted. The most useful thing for me that came from it was trusting my work enough to let other people see it without hovering over it like a nervous ghost. 

Between presentations, zoom meetings, papers, and my end portfolio review, it felt like the week would never end. Eventually, I leaned onto my humanity. In a world defined by AI, I decided to give myself some grace in the midst of everything. Was the work I produced perfect? Not even close. But when I started to focus on my work as progress versus a final product, it became a lot more natural to me. I just let my work be what felt right in the moment, rather than obsess over technical accuracy. 

And then, suddenly, it was over.

One minute you’re debating over cue times and color palettes, and the next you’re striking the space, pulling tape off the floor, and watching the theater go back to being just a room again. That might be the strangest part of all: how quickly something so intense becomes memory.

I came into the week thinking of finals as something to survive. Something to endure until I could finally exhale. But by the end, I realized it was also something I was building—literally and creatively. Not just a grade, not just a checklist, but a small world made of light and timing and collaboration.

And as for explaining theater finals to my boomer family members? Still working on that. At least now, I can show them my transcript to show them my degree is not acting. 

So maybe “A Streetcar Named Finals” isn’t really about being carried helplessly toward the end of the semester. Maybe it’s about realizing you’re part of the machinery moving it forward—cue by cue, moment by moment—whether you feel ready or not.

 

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