It’s about that time of year. It’s 40 degrees after a cruel glimpse of summer over Spring Break. The trees are beginning to bud and those buds fly off in the wind and smack you in the face. Your roommates track in mud and class work is making you want to scream. Who knows, you might even be graduating in a month’s time and are facing the anxiety of whether you will actually get to leave or not. It must be Quest time!
What is Quest Day, you ask? Is it the mythical trek to the Hidden Fields in search of mushrooms, the freshman quest for the meaning of college, or is it the day you sleep until 3 p.m. due to Questmas Eve celebrations? No, friends! It is the day where your fellow students attempt daring feats of academia in a quest for knowledge. Don’t believe us? We’re pretty sure nobody actually said what Quest is supposed to stand for, so you can make up your own fancy definition or just go with ours.
In all actuality, Quest is the day where the Campus Center and Lanigan Hall are filled with presentations of student research. Hopefully you all know this by now, as it’s quite the fun day if you know what you’re doing. Take a look online at the schedule and see some of the presentation topics, some of them sound pretty cool and/or hilarious. There are presentations for pretty much any major, with Iran is Toast, West African Women As the Comparator Class to the Trans Atlantic Slave Trade 18th ro Early 19th Century, Using Criticism to Your Advantage, Commercialized Presentation of Thanksgiving in Magazine Media, Digitellers, Synthesis of Meso-sulfobutyl Tetrapyridyl Porphyrin (you try typing that up), Neural Networks: New Perspectives and the Discussion on the Summit for Supporting Student Start-ups. There’s really something for everybody there, and you aren’t limited to one area, either. It allows you to explore some of the really cool stuff that you probably don’t even know is going on around campus.
Your professors will sometimes make you go; sometimes it will be an extra credit opportunity. You should take it as an awesome opportunity. Take some notes if you have to, but go to enjoy it and not as some forced laborious task. Your professors did not tell you to go for their own pleasure but for your mind wealth and possible increase in brain size.
Even if you feel like you’ll have too much work to do that day to go to Quest, leave differential equations or your 15-page paper for just half an hour and just walk around. The Campus Center corridor will literally be packed with posters and people very willing to tell you about them and the research they did to create them, and maybe they’ll even tell you about how many hours they put into it if you ask. It won’t be a small number.
Frolic in the meadow of biology posters and bask in the glow of anthropology presentations. Go and awe at the computer graphics and weep at the video game simulations. Fall to your knees for psychology talks and prostrate yourself before the power of meteorology graphs. Go forth and leave your dorm room. Escape the monotonous library and get some knowledge into your skull that you would never have been able to have if it weren’t for the glory of Quest Day.
