Here, for your reading pleasure, are ten things I learned from finals week…which started at midnight Monday morning. Ah, who am I kidding? You are probably bleary-eyed, wearing two day old clothes, eating cookies off a paper plate, and clutching a mug filled to the brim with lukewarm coffee to your chest. Put simply, you’re probably in college, which is why you’re reading this random post on ten things I have learned from this particular finals week.
And here we go…
1.) Sleep doesn’t exist. There is studying and brief naps in between. Then you take a test. Rinse. Repeat. Sleep is for the weak, the dead, or those immature high-schoolers.
2.) Don’t be overconfident. But also don’t over-study. Make you take breaks to down multiple mugs of coffee, or go to the gym, or make out with the drunk blonde next door.
3.) You probably should deactivate your Facebook account like my extremely intelligent friend Andrew did. You never thought time could go out the window so fast until you first clicked the “Sign Up” button on the main page of that cesspool, abyss, and black hole of time.
4.) Forget girls (or guys). They don’t matter during finals week unless you’re in a relationship, in which case you should devote about ten minutes per day to them. Then say you have to study and actually GO study.
5.) Do take time though to hang out with your friends (guys or girls, it doesn’t matter). Give yourself breaks in studying; just don’t take too long of breaks. That 4.0 GPA won’t create itself.
6.) Personally I don’t find finals any harder than any other tests in college. The key to this is to start studying a week ahead of time, as is the norm for me. Do that and finals is one of the easiest weeks of the semester. You have no classes and can just focus on your final exams and that’s it. Of course, if you wait to study until the night before, you’re not going to do so well.
7.) Apparently listening to dubstep with epic bass drops helps me study for exams better.
8.) Likewise, I apparently write better papers listening to metal-core/post-hardcore songs as well.
9.) Being able to sleep a rare fourteen straight hours is a feeling akin to winning the lottery. You just feel…awesome. Amazing.
10.) And finally, it pays to be involved in clubs, especially during finals week. I got an entire pizza just to myself simply because I’m a Senator in the Student Government Association.
Dang, I NEVER got free pizza in college. Guess I shoulda joined a couple of them clubs in my free time, rather than wasting it on … well … getting wasted! (But I bet I’ve got better stories than you! Like our buddy, in the wheelchair, who decided to see how fast he could go down the ramps of the vertical mall we hung out at. He started on 7 – never made it past 5!
)
Of course, it took us longer to go through college, what with all the stone tablets and chisels…. :p
I bet haha and the dinosaurs you rode to class.
I try to balance my time equally between clubs, classes, and social activities…
Ahh…but the pleasure of a job well done will carry you into the next semester…that and a nice long break when you can get that fourteen hours of sleep. As I was reading your post, I realized that finals week in college is kind of like the Christmas shopping season in retail…very little sleep, way too much junk food, way too little social interaction, doubt that you’ll make it through it, and then…then…finally…yes, finally…the day when you realize you survived and that all of your hard work paid off (you with a 4.0 GPA, me with a nice, fat bonus)!! Unlike John, I don’t have any truly exciting stories about college life…boring, I know. Do you want me to make something up? I can do that…I am, after all, a writer and that’s what we do!
Sure, go ahead. Spin me a tale about college haha. I already have a nice chunk of stories and I’m only finishing up my first year of undergrad studies.
The parallels between the Christmas season and finals week are striking!