There’s tension in the air, most of the Dreyfoos population have stress cried, and teachers have mountains of work to grade; that means one thing: it’s jury season. While juries are seen by some as an opportunity to display their work, they end up being primary causes of stress and deterrents to studying for exams. As fragmented as the majors at Dreyfoos are, a unifying factor is stress over juries. Along with exams and semester grades being finalized, students have to display their art. This varies widely across majors and even within them. Each major has different requirements to meet, and while teachers try to be accommodating to their students, these requirements are often a large generalization within majors.

Juries come at an extremely inopportune time: right before, and sometimes, during exams. This causes higher levels of stress and panic over being unprepared for exams in academic classes. Arguably worse, though, is the fact that having to do juries around exam time leads to one of two things: either staying up late the night before an exam to study for the subject students are being tested on the next day, or staying up late the night before an exam to complete juries.

While the need for juries is understandable, it unfortunately de-legitimizes academic courses.  A prevalent issue at Dreyfoos is valuing arts over academics. It’s important to have a passion for what we came here to do, however we have to have a passion for academics too. We have to realize that academics are equally important. Juries tend to be time consuming, even when that time is budgeted well. The more work that is assigned for something, the more value we subconsciously give it. We are all artists here, but we have to remember that we’re also students.

A possible solution to these issues could be changing the time or the extent to which juries take place. If juries took place a week earlier than they do now, we could have another week between this heavy stream of work and academic exams.

Another possible solution is to limit the amount of work that is assigned. This would allow the jury schedule to stay the same. This would also give students more time to study for their academic classes and keep their grades up in the vital end of the semester.

Jury season will always be a difficult time for students of Dreyfoos. This is for a multitude of reasons, and could be made better through making some adjustments.