Is “Comps” Plural?

Saturday morning. I wake up, and it feels like a great day to give a 30 minute talk summarizing the entirety of my academic studies and projects from my past four years as a student at Carleton.

Actually, I woke up, and I thought “rats!” and then I went back to sleep for another 9 minutes, and then I got up and it was snowing outside, if you can believe it.

You might have heard of a “senior thesis,” a common project that students complete during their final year of undergraduate school. At Carleton, we call that “comps,” and I’ve never been sure whether that is a plural form of a shortened version of the word “comprehensive,” or something else entirely. Each major has its own version of comps, so students are working on a pretty wide variety of projects during their senior year.

One of my friends who graduated last year spent a few terms doing some group chemistry research, and then brought a top researcher from the specific area she was studying straight to Carleton to share the group’s work, collaborate, and ask questions. Another friend, an English major, wrote a television pilot about a very funny detective.

In the Cinema and Media Studies Department, we get to choose between writing a paper, producing a screenplay, or creating a short film. I’ve been working on my (experimental) short film since the beginning of last spring, and I finally presented my work at our department symposium on Saturday (it was snowing, remember?).

But before that: a lot of work.

Spring 2018. I get back to Carleton, and it feels like a great term to suddenly have a really solid plan for my cumulative thesis project.

Actually, I’m terrified, and I walk into the Cinema and Media Studies class Junior Production Workshop without a single idea. Fortunately, the class was designed for exactly my state of being, and the next 10 weeks had me full of ideas, and ready to shoot my project over the summer.

When I got back to campus, it was All About the Edit. CAMS set up the majors with another helpful class, Senior Production Workshop (as it were), where we could collaborate on one another’s projects and get feedback on our rough cuts. I spent a lot of time in the Weitz, where all of the good computers are on campus, and I truly had a blast. It’s definitely hard to show your work to your peers, but even after a lot of feedback, I felt good going back to edit and edit and edit my work. And then, late in November, I finished. Buuuuuuut I still had to install the dang thing.

I started only a few weeks ago, working with the production office to get my two separate pieces of video onto a system called SignEdje that would sync them up to play in sequence with one another. A lot of technical difficulties had me saying “I am not a computer science major” and walking up to the third floor to start hanging screens and cables and such. Luckily, the production office really did rescue my work, and I got to put those little machines in my installation room. Finally, my work took to its three dimensional space.

Saturday morning. I wake up, and it feels like a great day to give a 30 minute talk summarizing the entirety of my academic studies and projects from my past four years as a student at Carleton.

Actually, it did — at least, it did when I walked inside out of the cold cold snow and into the hall outside the cinema, where my fellow compsers were sharing bagels and coffee. It felt even better a few hours later to be done.

My installation’s still up for another few weeks, meaning I’m responsible for my comps until then, but I’ve officially compsed. I’m compsed out.

See my project (in 2D)

Lynn is a senior CAMS major and WGST minor from the desert. She’s super into podcasts, comedy, queerness, and food. You can catch her doing improv with Cujokra or stand up with the Queens of Comedy — or perhaps reading something by Roxane Gay, baking at Dacie Moses, looking at her résumé to remember what else she does, or in the Weitz trying to find her hard drive. Meet the other bloggers!