DATE: Friday, May 23, 1997                  TAG: 9705230061
SECTION: DAILY BREAK             PAGE: E1   EDITION: FINAL 

SOURCE: MICHELLE MIZAL, COLLEGE CORRESPONDENT 

                                            LENGTH:   66 lines

EPHPHANIES COME DURING STRESS OF EXAMS

EVERY ONCE in a while, a person reflects on life. His or her life, especially. I guess it's called self-realization. Sometimes it comes at the oddest of times. I have friends who can attest to having great epiphanies while sitting on a toilet seat or shaving their legs.

Mine happened to come during final exams.

Most college students would agree that many things come to mind during finals; that is, anything but studying for them. It's a wonder how many bedrooms finally get cleaned, cars vacuumed and clothes washed during final exams.

Anyway, after doing my laundry one recent weekend I remembered that my British Literature final was coming up. I had it mentally registered for a Monday at 8:30 a.m. Like any faithful student of higher education, I read a couple of pages Sunday night and woke up a whole 10 minutes early Monday morning to cram in a few more pages. I rushed to school, fighting the usual morning traffic on Route 44 to downtown Norfolk, only to find out that the exam would be Tuesday. I was a day early.

My first reaction was: ``Thank God! I have one more day to study.'' Then, I started stressing out. ``What if, the exam was yesterday,'' I thought, ``and I ended up failing the class, then messing up my GPA, then not graduating on time, then not having a good chance for a job?''

Then it got worse. I started thinking about my dead dogs, staying single, getting married, having children, not having children, traveling the world, settling down in my own place. My whole life was on my mind.

The older and wiser would say I'm too young to be worried about stuff like that. But every college student must go through this process. I call it the midlife crisis before midlife. Come on fellow final crammers - say it with me, because you know exactly what I'm talking about.

Just when you're about to finish your very expensive education, you begin to wonder: ``Is this really what I want to do? Am I gonna make it?'' Then you wonder, what would have happened if you walked down ``the road not taken.'' Where you would be right now? Should you have taken that road. Are you really liking the ``difference?'' Then you wonder if Robert Frost even knew what he was talking about.

Then, you try not to think about all those student loans you have to pay off after you graduate.

Then, something hits you.

For me, it was the familiar smell of burritos frying at the Mexican restaurant across campus. Somehow, that scent was reassuring. It calmed me enough to let me think reasonably about the past and future.

I thought back to my first trip to The Virginian-Pilot six years ago. There I was, a short, skinny, buck-tooth, ninth-grader with my 101 Dalmations lunch box (lunch boxes were in style then, OK). My journalism class trooped into the building, watched the 20-minute orientation video and toured the place. After that, I knew I wanted to work there someday.

After three years of braces and switching my major at least three times, I'm still writing for the paper. I haven't grown taller since ninth grade, but at 20, I have grown in other ways. I've grown to be thankful for all that I have - good parents, good friends, good mentors, good relatives. In short, I have a good life.

So why was I stressing?

You would be too if, for a single minute, you thought life as you know it was metamorphosing into something very scary, something very different, something very adult.

Like I said, it's the midlife crisis before midlife. It happens. But so do those bright little epiphanies on warm toilets or over fresh-fried burritos. MEMO: Michelle Mizal is a junior at Old Dominion University.

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