What Not to Do When Studying

Exam week is pretty scary. 3 months of your life have been spent attempting to learn the material that will comprise your final exam. All you want to do is pack up your bags and spend your days doing nothing other than sleeping and eating your Mom’s homemade mac n’ cheese. The only thing standing between you and a month of complete relaxation is a cumulative exam you have no idea how to study for. Don’t let this exam ruin the grade you spent long nights in the Dimond library earning! Everyone is dishing out study facts and creative memorization techniques this time of year, but here’s a few things you should stay clear of if you want to ace those finals.
 
1. Social Media
It all begins so innocently. You set your status to (insert cliche finals status here) and then you see that the girl you hate changed her profile picture and then you write an inside joke on your best friends wall and then you’re looking at the event she said she was attending and then you’re creeping on all the guests that declined to attend and during that a campus cutie fb chats you and before you know it it’s 2 am and you still have no clue how to draw a Lewis structure and your managerial accounting notes remain unopened! Stay off that twitter too, unless of course you’re tweeting @UNHHerCampus
 
2. Caffeine Overdosing
Call me the Jerry Garcia of caffeine addicts and you’d be pretty accurate. I know the side effects of a caffeine overdose first hand and trust me, it ain’t pretty. Shaky hands, sleepless nights and weird behaviors that could end in your entire closet and/or dresser drawers organized by color and season may result…but leave not a single one of your intro to media studies slides memorized. Overdoing the caffeine can keep you up for hours even after you call it quits on the studying and will leave you feeling miserable and craving even more the next morning. Use sparingly during finals or you might end up falling asleep and drooling all over your exam! Ew!
 
3. Boozing
While a glass of wine or a cold brew might calm your nerves during this stressful week, it’s all too common that one turns into two and two turns into three and after three you’re texting all your closets friends to come over for your f*** finals party! You’ll wake up in the morning to a beer-soaked notebook and a headache that will force you to study nothing but the inside of your eyelids. The temptation of an uncrowded bar may sound appealing but dropping a whole letter grade sure doesn’t! Suffer through this one last week booze-free and you’ll have a whole vacation of boozing ahead!

 
4. Thinking about what’s at stake
If the results of this exam could make or break your whole college career than it’s very likely that you’re going to be freaking out the entire week leading up to it (with good reason). While knowing that this exam is important can be a major motivator to turn off the Kardashian’s marathon and open your book, it can also backfire. The idea of doing poorly on an important exam can lead to serious anxiety for some and can make it difficult to shift your focus off how badly you need to do well and onto the actual material. Take a deep breath and try to remain calm. One bad exam grade shouldn’t be thought of as a reflection of your intelligence. Everyone makes mistakes, everyone has those days.
 
5. Studying with your gal pals
Okay lets be real here, studying with your girls means not studying at all. Studying in groups can be helpful in theory since you can bounce ideas off eachother but not when those ideas are adding more to your Christmas wish list than to your Anthropology study guide. We all mean well when we create these innocent study groups, hoping try a new study strategy and listen to someone without a PhD try an explain difficult topics, until someone mentions the fact that your professor has been wearing the same pants all semester which leads to an in-depth analysis of his outdated wardrobe. As much as we want it to work…there’s no hope for group studies.
 
6. Pinterest
If you’ve been following our articles for a few weeks now, you already know about our newest obsession: Pinterest. So awesome for cute apartment ideas, so horrible for your grades. Try your best to stay off it this week and take comfort in the fact that it will be there to soothe you when you’re bored at home wishing you were back at UNH.

 
7. Cram
We’re not in high school anymore kids, so studying the night before your exam isn’t going to cut it. Spending the whole night before your exam reading your text book cover to cover and memorizing all the info is 1. impossible and 2. miserable. Plan out your studying based on how much information is going to be on the exams and start your studying NOW!