Finals week is stressful for everyone. Luckily, Lafayette has de-stressing events both before and during finals to help relax and motivate students for their exams.

One of these highly anticipated events is Midnight Breakfast. On Sunday, Dec. 12 from 10 p.m. to midnight, students can head over to Marquis Dining Hall for classic breakfast foods such as eggs, pancakes, hash browns, sausage and bacon.

The catch? This midnight meal isn’t served by the usual dining services staff, but by Lafayette faculty and administration.

Each semester, the Office of Student Involvement invites students to nominate faculty and administration to serve students during Midnight Breakfast.

“It’s just a fun way for the administrators to kind of show appreciation for students, and it’s just really fun to walk up to the line and see your chemistry professor or your college president is serving pancakes or dishing out eggs,” Assistant Director of Student Involvement Melissa Dalrymple said.

In the past, Midnight Breakfast has seen anywhere from 250 to 550 students packed into Marquis at a time, but the number is expected to be smaller this year due to COVID-19 restrictions. This semester’s musical performer, an acoustic musician from Allentown named Seth Witcher, will be performing at the event.

Dalrymple explained that the Midnight Breakfast tradition is at least around 20 years old. Its purpose is “for students, faculty and staff to get together before finals and celebrate the ending of a semester.”

“We want to provide opportunities for people to get together and to strengthen the Lafayette community,” Dalrymple added.

The Finals Fairy is another finals week tradition. It is hosted by Skillman Library and led by Kylie Bailin, director of outreach and access services at the library.

From Monday to today, the Finals Fairy hid six prizes a day in Skillman for students to find. Prizes include a fully punched-out Skillman’s Café coffee card with a mug, coloring books with crayons, cozy socks, candy, puzzles and modeling clay. Students can find prizes on all floors of the library. Some are easy to stumble across, while others are hidden so well that they can only be found by following the hints on the @lafayettecollegelibrary Instagram account.

The Finals Fairy has left gifts in Skillman every semester since the fall of 2015. Bailin was inspired by Blackwell Library’s Finals Fairy at Salisbury University. The event is fun for the librarians to host as well.

Bailin explained that the goal of Finals Fairy is “to have a fun event that brings some stress relief to students…and to raise awareness of our social media accounts because we post other informative messages and fun things throughout the years, so we hope people will keep following us even after the event.”

Regardless of their methods, the organizers of both Midnight Breakfast and Finals Fairy aim to provide students with much-needed stress relief at the end of the semester. Whether they actually take away the pain of finals is another question — but at least students can start their exams with full bellies and free prizes.