As finals week looms in the near future, students across campus are hectic completing their final assignments of the semester and bracing themselves for the much-anticipated week of testing.

Most students during the week can be found buried in an ever-growing pile notecards and textbooks in their dorm, but, for student library workers, they must balance a rigorous work schedule alongside the typical stressors of finals.

Garret Guthrie, a junior mathematics major and two-sport athlete, is used to being strained for time. He spends his finals week working in the library as well as preparing for finals.

“It does get tough because I play football and run track,” said Guthrie.  “I work a couple hours each week and I feel like that is still easy to balance with my schedule.”

Guthrie works a just a few hours each week in the library, though hours increase during finals, and his duties range from helping students to organizing the wide variety of books that Eberly has to offer.

“Being a library assistant, [we] usually work a couple hours a week doing basic tasks like helping students, showing them where books are and helping them check books in and out if they need them for a paper or something,” said Guthrie.  “I usually check in magazines and books.  We also help move books around and show them off to see if students want to read them.”

In addition to adding new reads to the collection, the library is also a part of a program in which they donate used books in good condition to an organization that assists children in need.  While working, Guthrie usually does some work to help this program.

“We also get rid of old books and send them to Better World Books,” said Guthrie.  “The books that [are in good] shape and we delete, we send them to this company and they ship them out to children in need.”

Finals week will present Guthrie with some challenges that he is familiar with, but finds difficult to take care of at times.

“I have worked the finals week from 12 a.m. to 2 a.m.,” said Guthrie.  “It gets rough if you have to kick students out and they’re still studying. For the most part, I work in the middle of the day, like 11 or 12.”

Even though Guthrie typically works the dayshift, the time in the library is always valuable to him, whether it is 12 a.m. or 2 p.m.  Guthrie will be able to do some studying of his own while working in the library next week as many students will be silently studying in Eberly.

“We do have some free time, but for the most part they want us helping students out,” said Guthrie.  “Sometimes there are [instances] where they want us moving around the whole shift.  During finals week, most of the students are in their books studying, so we do have some time to do our own studying as well.”

Guthrie believes that it is never too early to start studying for such an important week of tests.
“Start studying now, you might feel it is unnecessary, but by the time it comes you don’t want to be stressing out too much,” said Guthrie.