Most students live their lives dominated by questions, “What is the professor talking about? Do you understand what they’re saying? What’s the grade cutoff to pass this class? How late can you drop a class? Why am I taking this class again?” and many others. Sometimes students have questions to which they just can’t find the answer. You’ve checked the course website, asked your friends, asked the T.A. and even dug out the syllabus from the first day of class. At this point, all a student can do is email the professor and hope they get back to you.

This process can be stressful for two distinct reasons. 1) You have to write an email and not sound like a complete idiot to your professor. 2) You then have to wait for a response from the professor. While some professors are good with email and respond to emails quickly, some professors are not. If you’re not careful, you could end up sitting at your computer for hours constantly refreshing, agonizing over an email. So here’s a list of fun and exciting things you can do while waiting for that professor to get back to you.

1. Check your email to see if they’ve responded yet.

2. Refresh the page just in case they sent it in the last 5 seconds.

3. Refresh it one more time for good measure. They still haven’t emailed you back? Time to move on.

4. Go on Facebook and scroll through your newsfeed.

5. Play the new basketball game on the Facebook messenger app.

6. Check your email to see if they’ve emailed you back.

7. Do a few stretches.

8. Clean up your room.

9. Go back to Facebook and watch all the random videos that show up on your newsfeed.

10. Check your email.

11. Watch an episode of your favorite sitcom. (Probably Friends, How I Met Your Mother, The Office, New Girl, or Parks and Rec).

12. Check your email.

13. Plan on watching only one more episode of the same sitcom, only to sit through five more episodes.

14. Wallow in guilt and self-loathing because you’ve spent hours watching TV.

15. Check your email.

16. Watch one more episode of TV.

17. Attempt to start homework for another class.

18. End up on Facebook scrolling through your newsfeed one more time.

19. Clean your room again (because is that thing ever really clean?)

20. Check your email.

21. Go workout (partly to avoid the freshman 15 but mostly to put off doing your other work).

Maybe your workout looks something like this:

But it probably looks more like this:

22. Check your email while you’re working out.

23. Shower.

24. Check your email.

25. Write an Odyssey article.

26. Have a dance party with yourself in your room.

27. Go get ice cream.

28. Check your email.

29. Refuse to go to office hours and talk to your professor in person because dang it they should just email you back.

30.Before you know it the semester has ended, all without a response.

31. Eventually you graduate college, still waiting for the email that never came even though it has become completely irrelevant. (And if you’re being totally honest with yourself, you knew what the response would be before you even sent it and this horrible process started.)

Better luck next time!