December is here, and yes, fellow Bearcats, it’s finals week. People are generally stressed and grouchy, normally clean-shaven guys have been reduced to nothing but cavemen and suddenly Glenn G. Bartle Library is more poppin’ than State Street on Halloween. You are stressed out. You hate everything. You only have two friends left, and one of them is BuzzFeed. So now what? How are you going to handle these trying times? Will you sit huddled in a corner, wishing you picked any class but Calc 2? Will you call your parents crying, out of desperation for some non-academic human contact? Will you simply lose it, and go viral on YouTube because you flipped over a desk in one of the Pods?

No. No you will not. We here at Release need you to know that you can do it. Nay, you will do it! Quitting is for other people. Quitting is not for you. As Lance Armstrong once said, “Pain is temporary. Quitting lasts forever.” If the poster guy for rubber bracelets and disappointment won’t quit, then you definitely can’t. Now is the time when our priorities must be lined up, and our Netflix queues must be put on hold. How many pages do you have left to read? How many pages do you have left to write? 10? 50? 100? Let it be a consolation that no matter how much you have left, some unlucky graduate student has way more. Also, once that teaching assistant is done actually doing work, he or she will need to beg for approval from 25 versions of your least favorite professor. You only need approval from two people: yourself, and some really exhausted and overworked TA who is just SO done with his or her fall semester, professor, workload and you.

Now is the time where you get to show what you are made of. You can prove yourself as a member of collegiate academia. You can learn what collegiate academia actually means. Now is when you can incur weeks worth of stories that are family Christmas party-friendly, because does your Aunt Cheryl really need to know about the four Jägerbombs you did on a Tuesday night? Be prepared to experience the college life that your high school guidance counselor warned you about.

On the topic of being prepared, there are things that you need to know as you embark on this journey. Know that you will see more pictures of textbooks on Instagram than you ever needed to. Know that just because someone tweeted about Starbucks coffee, it doesn’t mean that he or she is any more awake than you are. Yes, it’s finals week, but it doesn’t mean you can lose your humanity. Eat meals and brush your teeth! Gandhi once said, “You must be the change you wish to see in Bartle,” or something like that.

Anything is possible. Aspire for an A! Work for an A! The only thing standing between U and an A is 19 letters! You are not only a weekend warrior! Now you are a weekday warrior too. Do it for Baxter, do it for Harvey Stenger. Do it because we don’t have a football team and come on, there has to be one thing we are proud of here.

“If you can dream it, you can do it,” Walt Disney famously said before jumping into his icy time capsule. (But don’t worry, he’ll be back.) Listen to the man whose company eventually kickstarted Britney Spears’ career. She can do it, and so can you.

Students of Binghamton University, finals week has started, but this also means that it will be over soon. Before you know it, you will be on your way home, wondering just which 20 TV shows you will binge on over break. Will it be “Sherlock” (yes, it’s great)? “Orange Is the New Black?” Perhaps “Breaking Bad,” in a failed attempt to stay relevant? Who knows, but you will get there. As for now, finish this article! Then read and appreciate the rest of Pipe Dream, and then go back to studying! You are almost there. You will make it! You will ace all of your tests, and you will finish all of your papers! Go forth and prosper, fellow Bearcats — the sky’s the limit!