Have you noticed the grass is getting greener outside or perhaps that it is warming up a little bit? Maybe not if you are stressed and ripping your hair out in chunks right now thanks to finals coming up. In any case, I’ve got some important thoughts and tips that might make the seemingly never-ending dread ease up a bit.
The first tip I have for you to be better prepared for all those finals coming up is to not study with your friends. Yes, you heard me right. Do not, I repeat, do not study with your friends. If you are freaking out right now, you most likely need to cram as best you can. Hanging out with your friends to study will only slow you down. I would even call it a time-suck.
If you’re with a group of friends who don’t want to take their finals and are just as stressed as you, you will all just feed off each other’s negativity and laziness and nothing will get done. Instead, find somewhere quiet, hammer home the basics, and know when to stop studying so that you don’t fry your brain.
My next tip goes along with not over-studying. Believe it or not, there is a point where your brain will simply stop taking in information and saving it for later. You need breaks for your brain and more importantly, you need breaks for your body.
I’m talking about sleep. I’ve been guilty of arriving at a final completely sleep-deprived thanks to staying up all night trying to study. Want to know how that exam went? Terribly. I did not get as good of a grade as I was capable of. Had I simply accepted that an A wasn’t going to happen and slept, I would have gotten a better grade.
So, please, don’t do what I did. Just get that full 8 hours of sleep and show up knowing what you know. If you’re behind on studying at this point, that is on you. Do not hurt your grade further by neglecting to take care of yourself physically. (Also don’t forget to eat).
The last tip I have for you is to stay positive. If you fail, you fail. If you pass, you pass. Life keeps moving forward regardless of what happens. You can either let the failure hurt your outlook on life or you can take it as a building block you use as a boost to do even better next time around.
I always like to say any experience is good experience because any experience you get is something you can learn from. College can be really tough sometimes, nobody is going to deny that, but just because something is hard doesn’t mean it isn’t worth it. Keep trying, keep pushing and you’ll get where you want to be in due time.
As one final thought that may get you through this next week, especially if you’ve lost all hope and now live in a black void of despair, is that no matter what happens, objectively speaking finals will be over in a week. If you can stay alive for that long, whether pass or fail, you will be free from this semester.
Best of luck!
