In the wake of that stressful time, with finals directly above our heads and the semester winding to a close, all of us are simply enjoying this moment in which the holidays are upon us, and we are surrounded by family and bad Christmas movies and hot chocolate. During finals week, we wander the hallways looking for an open study room and find that they are all full of equally dejected students, or we pile into the library, crowding too-small tables with an air of mutual exhaustion and a vague sense of dread hitting us like a wave every time the doors open. It somehow feels like the entire semester is crashing down at one moment.
I don’t know why college is engineered this way. There are endless activities around campus to alleviate stress. The dorms have 24/7 quiet hours. The campus looks like a ghost town, its students feebly making their way around the desolate walkways like zombies. My roommate might as well have had an IV attached to her arm filled with coffee, and all of my friends were sick from the weather, or stress, or both. It is a version of hell that no one is able to prepare you for until you’re in the center of its hearth, clinging to your sanity with loose fingertips.
But here’s something they don’t tell you when you’re in college, when your hands are stained yellow and orange from your highlighters and your notes are spread before you with annotations like battle scars made of ink: it is OK to fail. It is OK that your brain feels numb and your body is shutting down so that you cannot study anymore. And it is OK if you closed your textbooks and open Netflix to simply breathe for 30 minutes. It is equally OK if maybe you didn't perform as well as you wanted to.
This time in our lives is built into something so final, so essential to the entirety of our future, that it carves out the substance of students and leaves behind hollowed out shells that sit in desks with pencils clutched between shaking hands. And I do not mean to undermine the importance of a lot of these exams; for many, their final exams are worth a terrifying total of their grade, and a huge chunk of their GPA rests upon that tiny collection of numbers. But that tiny collection of numbers and letters, which to the outside world look maddeningly ambiguous and meaningless, does not define you. It is a facet of you, a piece of your education, but not you.
College is supposed to be a time of growth and fun and, yes, learning. But do not allow these numbers to dictate your life, to break you down into tiny little pieces so that when you look at your notes in front of you, all you can do is cry. College is not supposed to ruin you; it’s supposed to help you learn, grow, discover, develop. It’s supposed to be a time of trial and error, a time to experiment with new things and new ideas. But it isn’t supposed to break you. This semester has come to a close, and those exams are behind you, and you cannot change the past, try as you might (tragically, there are no Time Turners in the real world).
It can be scary, looking at your final grades and feeling as though the entire universe is collapsing in on itself. For many of us, college has been the first time we've been challenged in school, the first time we've experienced less-than-perfect grades. But as my best friend kindly reminded me in the midst of my own breakdown in the aftermath of finals week, "Even Hermione didn't get perfect grades, OK?"
