We may stand on the brink of a long weekend for Thanksgiving, and we may be preoccupied with the thought of a homecooked turkey dinner, watching the parade on TV, and tons of Black Friday deals; but students still have one more big stressor this calendar year: finals.
Final exams will cause a different level of unnatural stress (after all, causes of stress are completely subjective) for everyone, but the looming deadlines and late night study sessions fueled by Insomnia Cookies are enough to make anyone want to throw their textbooks out of the window (which you shouldn’t do because that is an offense prosecutable by law in New York City). And of course, doing certain things to abate school-related stress like taking short breaks every hour, getting plenty of sleep and studying in a quiet place like Bobst are a great help, but there are several nontraditional ideas of relaxation techniques and study strategies floating around in the heads of NYU collegiettes.
Bianca Valle, in Tisch for Film and Television Production, is taking Cultures and Contexts this semester and in preparation for her midterm, used flashcards while pacing around her dorm room. Spanish being her native language, she has honed in her skill as tool for memorization; she associates key words from the texts that she is reading to spanish ones that she will be able to remember.
Another creative tactic that Sternie Ashley Cardounel practices is one of association. In order to remember important places or people, Ashley relates them to people that she already knows to make studying a little bit easier. I suppose this method can’t be so easily applied to your Calculus quiz this Friday, but it will surely help you remember the colonists’ role in the Boston Tea Party when you remember what your friend Tanya did at your pool party two summers ago.
Remaining calm during those long hours of cramming is probably just as important as the actual knowledge that you may or may not have retained during your lecture. Gagarin Zhao, a freshman in CAS, indulges in the serene atmosphere that jazz can provide. She turns up the old school jams to better focus on her homework. Another student in CAS, Jan Ileto, agrees that music does produce a certain tranquility, but prefers a different genre.
“I like listening to gangsta rap!” Jan said.
Amanda Garrick, a Biology major, likes to run some hot water and do what she calls “power reading” where she sits in the bathtub for a couple of hours at a time and finishes whatever book that was assigned that week. She developed the habit in high school and plans on keeping it alive for the next four to eight years.
I, too, can testify to the fact that a clean body lifts the spirit and calms the mind for I have grown accustomed to taking at least two showers a day, each illuminated solely by the light of my Copeland radio station on my mobile Spotify account.
Although you may not blast hardcore music or recite last week’s notes in a foreign language, I know that you have your own idiosyncratic methods and to that I say keep NYC weird.