You tell yourself during every finals week that next semester, you will get your act together and prepare ahead of time instead of cramming 15 weeks worth of knowledge into your noggin in one night. As the days go on throughout the week and the energy in your body depletes at an exponential rate, your motivation to keep the new resolution becomes stronger and stronger. Finally, you finish your finals and you can go home and get that well deserved R&R! But before you know it, the break is coming to an end and you start getting flustered, preparing all of your school items (really just trying to track down where your lucky pencil is), looking up which textbooks you need, what teachers you have, which days you have time to actually eat lunch and dinner, and so on. It gets rough. Then you finally get to school all wide-eyed, gung ho, and ready to take on the semester!

And the first two or three weeks are feeling great! It gets easier to wake up after the first week or so and you get into this great groove, cruising through your classes.

You and your classmates have also gotten more comfortable with each other, talking more and entering the really beginning stages of friendships that will end up in late nights texting each other “WTF did prof XYZ mean by this assignment??? Literally do not understand SOS!!!”

And then the first midterm hits. No one knows what happened. Some thought it was too easy, others were not even able to finish it. You get into a funk, trying to figure out what went wrong, going through your papers, all your notes, all the questions on the test, questioning whether or not you actually wrote your name on the front. Every equation just gets the same answer.

You stress out and decide you just did not study enough, so you start staying up late. The gym is no longer an option; that time is better spent with a book. It gets harder to get up now without your alarm making every morning feel like

You feel like there is no point in going to school like you should just drop out and go hide in a forest and live the rest of your life as a hermit. There is no use for trigonometry and proper grammar usage in the forest!

But then the work pays off! The second midterm goes swimmingly and you’re feeling great!

It is now that your classmates realize that you have the material figured out and they ask you questions left and right but then you realize something: they have no clue what happened past the first month of class.

You help them anyway since you know what is going on. Plus, it helps you to study as well. But all the studying catches up to you and you start to get sick. You still go to class if you are not feeling too much like death, but you are trying to keep yourself together daily so that you do not play the never-ending game of catch up since that turns into a snowball effect.

Thank goodness you start to feel better before the third exam and the review session for the final. Your hard work is paying off!

You go into finals week like...

And come out like...

Good luck this semester to everyone!