Welcome Back to Midterm Season!

Let me paint you a picture: It’s the fourth week of classes and you’re sitting in an on-campus café, drinking a warm chai latte that is the perfect balance of spice and sweetness. It may be -27°C outside, but the sky is blue and the sun is slowly melting the icicles outside the café window. You’re in the coziest of sweaters and a brand-new pair of socks, and you smile at the barista carrying the tray of freshly-baked scones (they’re still warm). You hear the comforting sound of a crackling wood-burning fire—it’s from the Hogwarts Hufflepuff Common Room Ambience video you have going on your laptop, but it does the trick all the same. You feel calm and content. You feel happy. 

And then, everything changes once you notice the dreaded notification on your OnQ: “Announcement: Upcoming Midterm”. The sky immediately clouds over. Your sweater is suddenly itching you in that one place you can never reach. Your hands start sweating on your laptop as you realize that, somehow, you have a 50% midterm in a week and a half. You think “Well, sh*t”.

Midterms: you either love ‘em or you hate ‘em (but let’s be real here, many of us hate them or at least strongly dislike them). Like any time at university, midterm season has its ups and downs—there’s the good, the bad, and the ugly. But there’s also ways to combat the harder parts of midterm season, and ways to bring more good into your life so that you can focus less on stress and more on feeling your best. We’ll start by discussing the common struggles that many uni students experience during midterm season:

1. The Bad & the Ugly: Stress, Comparison, and the Humble Brag Phenomenon

Along with end-of-year exams, midterm season is a notorious magnet for stress, anxiety, and a decline in self-care. Between carving out time to study and trying to make sure you don’t fall behind on assignments and readings, it’s easy to feel overwhelmed and exhausted. This is often exacerbated when comparison comes in—it’s hard to not feel bad about your own study habits when you hear stories of people who started studying months in advance.

In addition to that, comparison is taxing on your mental health. We’ve all been in that situation when, five minutes before an exam, you hear classmates revelling in negativity right outside the exam hall or pseudo-modestly comparing their academic achievements. The humble brag is often present in these scenarios, and whether one says it or hears it, it rarely feels good. Defined by Oxford Languages as “an ostensibly modest or self-deprecating statement whose actual purpose is to draw attention to something of which one is proud”, the humble brag never fails to add to your own nervousness. 

There’s no doubt that midterm season can be stressful and overwhelming at times. However, it is just as important—or arguably, even more important—to remember that, with all the bad and the ugly, there is an unwavering supply of good and wonderful things about midterm season, and many of those things start with you.

2. The Good: There’s just so much of it!!!

My mom has taught me so many valuable life lessons, but if there’s one thing I’ve taken away from our conversations together, it’s this: the moment when you feel too busy for self-care is the moment when self-care has never been more important. 

By the nature of university life, students have a lot to balance. However, taking good care of yourself is one of the most important yet underrated aspects of maintaining good mental and physical well-being. None of us have to have it all figured out just yet, but taking a few minutes to figure out what self-care looks like to us as an individual is the first step. And yes, it really is different for everyone. Whether self-care means taking a warm shower to wash off the day’s stress, going to bed earlier during busier times, taking time to cook yourself a nice meal, or scheduling-in group studies with friends, I think self-care can be anything that makes you feel better. Feeling better isn’t just reserved for after you finish midterms—you deserve to feel better during and always! However, take some extra time to remind yourself that feeling better and being kind to yourself *is* inherently productive. Go you!!!

Whatever comes will also go, and that includes midterm season. The semester is nearly halfway over, which means the days are getting longer and before we know it, it’ll be summer! Soak up the sun while you study, even if it’s from inside the CoGro windows, and know that you can do this.

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• midterms
• self-care
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