Surviving Midterms

This article is coming to you live from the beginning of my hell week. It’s only Monday and I feel like this day will never come to an end. Today, I had one of my impossible quizzes (as I like to call them) for my T.S Eliot class that I am taking. I call it an impossible quiz because my professor conveniently puts the most absurd questions on these quizzes, making them almost impossible to pass. I also had three passage analyses due in my Chaucer class, and if you’re not familiar with Chaucer, I’ll just say that it’s written in Middle English and it’s impossible to understand. The fact that I had to dissect three different passages from The Canterbury Tales and then follow the absurd rules of this analysis exercise to the utmost perfection made my weekend absolutely dreadful. Now, for the rest of the week, I have two midterms and two essays on Thursday and Friday. One midterm and essay on Thursday, and the other essay and midterm on Friday. This week, to be quite frank, absolutely sucks.

I’m sure that many of you reading this article can relate to the nature of my week and how I’m feeling. I want to let you know that the only thing keeping me sane right now is the thought of going on a week long break starting Friday afternoon. Everyone always writes these fantastically clever articles about the best tips and tricks for surviving midterm and finals week, and the ideas are great; however, when the week actually comes, I find that I don’t listen to any of them. It’s hard to not stress out during a VERY stressful time. When you have a billion midterms and essays to tackle, it’s hard to just take a second and stay calm. You have a billion things rushing through your mind at full speed, because there are just about a billion things for you to get done. Although I don’t think I can take your stress away completely, I can tell you what I have been doing to prepare myself for this week.

For starters, at the end of last week I got my planner out and wrote down every deadline in big red letters. I also made sure to actually use my desk calendar, and I wrote down every deadline there as well. Then, I used my chalkboard to, again, write down every single deadline. The last thing you want to do during hell week is to forget something because it will literally seem like the end of the world, which is why I made sure to get all these deadlines written down in so many different places. The next thing I did started today, and I will continue to do it throughout the week. It is to make a daily to-do list of everything I want to accomplish that day. When you do this, make sure to cross things off during the day because you will feel ten times more productive when you see that you are actually getting stuff done. The last thing I will do today is wind down with my favorite TV show ‘Friends’ because it really soothes my stress and puts me right to sleep. I know it’s super tempting to stay up all night studying, but if you get everything done on your to-do list for the day, then GO TO SLEEP. Being sleep deprived will NOT help you this week at all. I know it’s hard to not stay up late, but you should set a goal of what time you want to go to bed, and stick to it. That way you’ll get an ideal amount of sleep each night which will definitely increase your survival rate. I want to wish everyone good luck on their midterms if they are coming up, and I want to let you know that we are in this together.