Wrapping up a semester is always an uncomfortable mixture of excitement for summer, and terror for finals. If you're done with finals, i'm incredibly jealous. If you're just getting started, God's speed. If you haven't experienced finals week, I will do my best to relay my version of an accurate depiction.
Professors have more business in office hours during the final week than the entire semester combined. You have a hard time finding a seat in a typically near-empty lecture hall, class group me's discuss meeting in library study rooms to cram at midnight, and the 500 coffee shops near campus are so packed it feels like it might be a fire hazard. Who started the rumor that you need to have coffee at four o'clock in the afternoon in order be productive? Why does the image of students on laptops in coffee shops provide the perfect visual for "studying"? We've all seen the image on the cover of a college brochure - and if you haven't wouldn't it look perfect? I may or may not be at a coffee shop in front of my laptop as I write this. The financial strain from buying at least one coffee a day (on top of the coffee I make in my Keurig at home) is almost more stressful than the actual finals. And then there's the social act of studying. Some of my tests aren't going to be hard, but I still have to sport the stressed, exhausted college student look we all wear in early December and May every year. The game we all play called "who can function on the least amount of sleep," or "who spent the most hours staring at a textbook."
As we finish out finals week this semester, and any semester in the future, I suggest we try to remember:
- GPA's can be nice, but sometimes sleep can be nicer.
- If you stay up too late studying, you could oversleep for your final and that would be worse than failing right?
- All you can do is study, and try your best.
We've made it this far, surely we'll make it through. I apologize that this advice is fairly obvious and mediocre, but i'm only twenty and I have finals to study for. Maybe next year I will have unlocked the secrets to handling finals week like a pro, but for now this is all I have. Stay tuned.
