Remember the final week of the fall semester, when you stayed up all night writing your last paper, stumbled out of Delp Hall after turning it in the following day, and nearly collapsed into your car to return home in a post-finals daze? Remember thinking, “I will never let things get that bad ever again”?
That was a good thought, and you fully intended to act upon it to obviate the return of any similar episodes again. Then the second week of classes this semester began.
Although winter break provided a small yet welcome respite from the craziness of finals week, the despair, the stress, and the general delirium from last finals week still linger in the hearts and minds of students throughout campus. This small horror from the past gnaws at the diurnal tedium of students’ lives, preventing them from fully enjoying even the aspects of their lives furthest removed from the set of grueling examinations that cast their dim pall over the end of the year.
But the word “finals” does not have to send us cowering into our beds, preparing for endless nights of caffeine-facilitated sleep deprivation ahead. Instead, treat finals as they are meant to be treated: To test the knowledge gained throughout the entire semester, not to test what can be crammed into the brain in a few short days of study.
There is something you can do about all this immediately: Start studying for finals. Initiate early the habits that allow for the full comprehension of information. Set up meetings with professors and maintain a disciplined sleep schedule. Make productive habits when you have the time to do so. When the time is running short, those habits will hopefully become second-nature — and you’ll have completed the work far ahead of time.
Maybe this finals week, we can focus more on enjoying our last days with the senior class, and less on pulling secluded, library all-nighters. Just maybe. If not, well, praise the Lord and pass the caffeine.
