Finals.

The very mention of them is enough to elicit fear and anxiety across an entire campus. It's the time of the year all college students collectively dread.

We pull all-nighters, even though we know it is guaranteed to tank our success. We emotionally eat our way through each assignment, even though we know we will regret it later. We stay up until 3 a.m. trying to learn material that should have been absorbed weeks (sometimes months) earlier. We put on a fake facade, and pretend like we aren't dying on the inside, only to have it spill out in an emotional breakdown at 4 a.m. over page length, definitions, and formulas. We finally crawl into our beds at 5 a.m., double and triple check our alarms to make sure we don't oversleep.