Finals week is a literal legend. Never before have you seen such a large group of students huddled together in mutual mass panic, and never again would you want to. But finals week this semester seems to be stretching into finals month. I’ve got friends who are already on summer break, and even though my finals are weeks away, I feel like I took my finals as they took theirs a week ago. Why wait until finals week to assign a slew of essays all due at the same time, am I right, professors?
Though honestly, we’ve got no one but ourselves to blame. The assignment has been on the syllabus all semester, and what did we do?
1. We waited until last minute.
This is perhaps one of the most enduring habits of any student ever. Give us a month to complete an assignment and you can bet on the fact that we’ll be up the night before, frantically shoving sources into our research papers. This is great and all, until you’ve done this for every class and everything is due at once and there’s nothing left to do but panic.
2. We overdose on caffeine.
My room around finals week looks like an absurd piece of modern art, in which I’ve stacked together empty Red Bull cans and coffee cups still gross with dregs of abandoned caramel. The warning on my box of caffeine tablets says “does not replace sleep” but that’s exactly what I’ve been trying to do– figure out how much caffeine can make up for the fact that I’ve slept approximately 24 hours in one week.
3. We panic.
What else are you going to do when you have three papers and two exams in one week? And there’s plenty of time to do it because you’re sure as hell not sleeping. Each moment of the day is dedicated to planning out how much you can spend on one paper so that you don’t fail the other, and exactly how long your 14-minute nap should be so that you can have enough energy to not sleep through your last quiz of your literature class.
4. We give up.
We quit. It’s impossible, we’re tired, we’re going to fail anyway. “I can’t do this anymore, I’m literally just going to fail,” you tell your friend as you continue to frantically type at your keyboard. “I literally give up,” you say, still typing. Why are you still typing?