Is this password-cracking challenge possible?
Coming back to answer this since I see someone is wondering if I was able to do it.
The professor, seemingly realizing that this assignment wasn't possible in the time given, gave another hint that made this doable.

The plaintext is 8 characters long
The first character and last two characters are lowercase
There are two digits, and the rest of the password consists of only uppercase and lowercase letters (no symbols).
The second character is a digit

Using these criteria, there are only 12 possible arrangements for the remaining characters (characters three, four, five, and six, which contain a digit, two uppercase letters, and a lowercase letter.)
I made a list of the following masks in an .hcmask file, ran it through hashcat, and the crack now only took roughly eight hours.
?l?d?d?l?u?u?l?l
?l?d?d?u?l?u?l?l
?l?d?d?u?u?l?l?l

?l?d?l?d?u?u?l?l
?l?d?u?d?l?u?l?l
?l?d?u?d?u?l?l?l

?l?d?l?u?d?u?l?l
?l?d?u?l?d?u?l?l
?l?d?u?u?d?l?l?l

?l?d?l?u?u?d?l?l
?l?d?u?l?u?d?l?l
?l?d?u?u?l?d?l?l

The password ended up being cracked successfully: e3IDq9wv