Finals week is a time of massive stress for nearly every student on campus. In a week where looking for study space involves tripping over sleeping bags and finding Adderall is nearly impossible, how can students be expected not to lose sleep, weight and hair in the days and hours leading up to their exams? Perhaps, in October you were the Midterminator, and now you’re rocking back and forth in a corner, wondering how you’re going to pull it off. I am here to tell you that you will, and to calm the fuck down.
Let me give you some tough love for half a minute and pry you from your tear-stained calculus textbook so you can consider this: Panicking isn’t making your studying any more effective. It hardly ever makes anything more effective. It turns studying into an exercise in futility. Same with not sleeping.
No one has ever gotten out of a series of all-nighters and thought, “Great! I feel refreshed and ready to take a final!” Only you know how much sleep is going to be enough for you. Get at least that amount of sleep the night before your exam. It’s not impressive if you’ve gotten seven hours of sleep over five days in preparation for an exam, though your friends may “ooh” and “ah” over your fortitude. What’s impressive is if you manage to actually pull off decent marks. Your professor, after all, doesn’t grade you based on how many hours you’ve stayed awake. This isn’t a frat.
It’s natural to want to do well when being tested, whether it’s for art history or accounting. Still, if you find yourself in a dark, unnatural place, posting Facebook statuses about how it’s been nice knowing everyone, you may have gone too far. If you’re clawing at your face and your vocabulary is reduced to guttural grunts generally reserved for poor imitations of cavemen, you may have gone too far. That’s the moment to stand up, stretch and get some frozen yogurt. Chances are you probably haven’t been focusing all that much anyway.
This isn’t a column arguing in favor of taking finals week lightly. Most of these exams will count for at least 20 percent of your final grade. When you’re paying good money to go to this school and get these grades, it’d be stupid to not devote the better part of your time to studying. Real studying, that is. Not fake studying, where you sit in front of your laptop Tumbling.
Don’t waste your time. Why are you nesting in the Glenn G. Bartle Library if, after the first few hours of actual studying, 40 minutes out of the hour becomes devoted to moaning about how impossible this all is? Actually tumbling through the stacks would be a better activity. Just because you’re wasting your time in the library doesn’t mean it’s less of a waste of time than if you’re doing it in your room.
Everyone wants to walk out of an exam knowing they’ve done their best, from beginning preparations all the way through to actually turning in your papers, so put yourself in a position to do that. Plan ahead. Get some sleep so you can retain the information you’re studying. It’s as important as showing up to the exam itself with a working pen. Most importantly, though, breathe. Calm down.
Except if you’re studying for an engineering course. I hear that’s crazy.