It’s near the end of the semester, and with it comes a plethora of wild emotions downpouring like a summer thunderstorm—excitement for the summer, sadness for our graduating Seawolves, anxiety for what the future holds. A great many of us are preparing for our finals, which will inevitably overwhelm us and consume nearly all of our time. Despite that, however, we (first and foremost myself) should do our best to keep ourselves healthy and remember one critical piece of information that we may already know, but take to heart a little more so now.

Take care of your friends.

Take care of your friends when they’re calling you to just talk about some issue in their lives that you knew nothing about beforehand because they feel like they can trust you with that information. Take care of your friends when their anxiety takes over and they feel like nothing they do or ever can do will be able to dispel the doubt that clouds their self-confidence.

Take care of your friends when they lose their last shred of bravado and break down their walls to show you who they are after they’ve lost any semblance of control in their lives because you might be the rope that they cling to stay afloat.

Take care of your friends and love your friends despite the demands of finals and the pressure to succeed, because the mental health of the ones you love the most is far more important than some arbitrary grade in the pursuit of academia.

Love your friends, because without them we are without purpose. Love your friends, because they love you just the same.