Midterms.

That awful eight letter word that put the "dying" in studying and leads us to panic and question the real importance of a degree each semester. We know it's coming, but are never prepared. We tell ourselves that this semester is going to be different. We are going to plan ahead and start studying so far in advance and practically live in office hours.

But somehow, we find ourselves like this:

We know that we are in college and that we are held to a higher standard of academia than our young high school selves, but is it really necessary to have five tests and two papers due in the same week? There are only 24 hours in a day, after all.

The end of February to the beginning of March is, arguably, the time when the most coffee is drank, the least sleep is attained, and the most mental breakdowns are had by college students around the country. Their mental and physical endurance is tested by having to debunk the Aristotelian World View in one class and find the integral of an indefinite function in another. It's exhausting and stressful and, to be quite frank, stress that could have been avoided if all of these major grade milestones did not fall within five days of each other.

Granted, midterms week does teach a lot about yourself. You learn valuable lessons such as:

1. How to function on very little sleep.

2. What study technique works best for you.

And, most importantly...

3. The importance of study snacks.

If you can survive midterms, you can survive anything.

Overall, midterms are a dark time in most student's semester. However, they teach us that we are stronger (and smarter) than we thought and make us appreciate our education even more. And hey, once they're over,feel free to jump around and rejoice ... for a month until the cycle repeats itself.