Today marks the beginning of a six-day stretch of gloom, anxiety, depression and, in some cases, fear for students across the University of Louisiana campus as they march bleary-eyed into their classrooms for the first day of finals.

Behind the gritted teeth, red eyes and caffeine hangovers, a soft and silent mantra buzzes within the student's brain: "It's almost over. It's almost over."

Like many UL students, Leah Boyer, 19, a sophomore with a double major in French and political science, found a place away from home to study for the big test.

Boyer occupied a table at PJ's Coffee and Tea Co. on the UL campus Sunday afternoon as she studied for a test that makes many students in the liberal arts realm cringe: elementary statistics.

For Boyer, the final is bittersweet.

"My plague in life is math. I can study politics and languages all day, but numbers just don't stick with me," Boyer said. But when she's finished with the test, she's also finished with math in general.

"I'm done with it," she said with a smile.

Paul Bankole, 17, a freshman from Nigeria majoring in biology, found his home away from home at the UL library Sunday.

Bankole sat before a table with foreign looking symbols called chemistry formulas jotted across the papers that lay before him.

Bankole said he was pushing off two other tests to study for his chemistry test Thursday. His two other finals, English and biology, would have to wait, he said, because the chemistry was the hardest.

"I'll wait until the last minute for those," he laughed.

Katie Kaufman, 20, a nursing sophomore, said she came to the library to escape all the distractions.

"My house is way too distracting," she said. "I'm married, and my husband is home all day during the weekend and he's kind of distracting. Just a tad."

She said she was studying for two finals, but one of them, her nursing final, held precedence over the other. It is scheduled for 8 a.m. today, "early, early, early," she said.

"I got here at 3 o'clock and I'll probably be here late tonight," she said, half-smiling, half-frowning.