Week Two of Mid-Terms Special

Your printer breaks down the night before the paper is due, you conveniently misplace all of the notes you were supposed to be studying with for tomorrow’s exam, and you drink so much coffee that you wake up still tasting it in the morning. I will not even mention the chronic lack of sleep deprivation. Half of the campus is walking around like they are practicing for zombie auditions in a horror movie next week. If any of this has yet to happen to you, consider yourself lucky, and pray to the exam and technology gods that it never does.

If this sounds at all cynical, please understand that spending most of my night hours with my laptop and Earl Gregg Swem has done nothing for my optimistic attitude towards life. However, following up on last week’s instructions for Campus Crushes, I will do my best to apply some of my knowledge to this week. Consequentially, if you are looking for boy advice, I’d advise you to start a love affair with your textbook.

Tip 1: Work hard, play hard. Mid-terms and Final Exams are the best times to justify the rest of your college behavior throughout the year. It is also the perfect time to hone your procrastination skills down to an art form. At this point, Facebook is at the root of all unfinished papers. If you are one of the few people brave enough to deactivate it during exams, I bow down to your resolve. For the rest of us, try to take working in one hour increments. Work for one hour, then take a much needed break. Start and repeat.

Tip 2: If you’re worried it might be on the exam, it most likely will be. This may sound like common sense, but I still fall prey to this trap every time. If it’s a math section, work on the problems you have the hardest time with. If it’s a science class, make you sure you memorize and understand the most impossible section. If it’s literature, then at least sparknote the readings you procrastinated on. Professors adore curveballs. I honestly think they wean some sort of internal satisfaction from presenting their students with a trick question they can later laugh at while grading.

Tip 3: REMEMBER TO SLEEP. Now I understand that this might be one of the last things on your list, but I honestly cannot stress it enough. In fact, aim to fall just short of sleeping beauty’s prowess at a goodnight’s rest. It has been SCIENTIFICALLY proven that the only way you will actually successfully retain all of the information you crammed the night before is if you let your brain rest and absorb all of the information. Just because we college students can be our own brand of superhero with our ability to survive on short naps, chips, candy, alcohol, and pizza, it does NOT mean that we are invincible. Realize you’re crashing and burning early enough to get to the parachute.

Tip 4: The last one is just as obvious: be CONFIDENT in your abilities. Unless you are Einstein’s descendant, you will not achieve perfect scores on your exams, but IT’S OKAY. College is a place for learning, and so are exams. You mess up? Fix it for next time. The rest of us are doing the exact same thing. With that in mind, you are MUCH smarter then you sometimes give yourself credit for. Just because there is that one genius kid in all of your classes that you feel like you cannot compare to, does NOT mean that you are still not one of the most intelligent people in the room. I will not even mention the statistics in terms of the world population. If I had to guess, I would say that for every person currently in college (imagine yourself), there are about half a million people that aren’t (about the size of a medium city).

Tip 5: Last of all, I am going to ask you to picture something in your head. This would be more effective if you could close your eyes, but then reading the rest of this would be a bit of a problem. Think back to last semester’s exams, the stress, the caffeine over-dosage, the chronic unhappiness. Next, think of how you felt after you were done with your last exam – ecstatic, carefree, joyful, and relieved. Picture in your head how amazing it will be once you are done. Now smile and pick up that textbook with a lighter heart.
3 more days (or a mere 72 more hours) until Spring Break.

Let the countdown begin.