Over the course of the past few days I have come to the conclusion that the only thing worse than finals week itself is the week before finals. You go from being able to handle everything to swimming in the amount of homework you have to get done. On Thursday your Italian teacher assigns you a group project, but here's the catch, you're going to be out of town all weekend it is due at the beginning of class on Tuesday. Somehow everything magically becomes due on the same day. Before you know it you have gotten six hours asleep all week and are drinking four cups of coffee before 9 am.

The stress starts to pile up and before you know it you have forgotten what it means to be relaxed anymore. The things that once brought you so much peace now only stress you out. You try to take a short mental break and watch a single episode of your favorite show on Netflix, but all you can think about is how stressed you are and how many things you still need to get done. There's no escape.

The weekend before the last week of finals is a procrastination trap. Starting Friday night you start telling yourself that you have two days where you can work on homework with nothing else going on. Saturday afternoon rolls around and you tell yourself that you can knock it all out tomorrow as long as you get up early-ish. Then all of a sudden it's 6pm on Sunday and you haven't even unzipped your backpack.

Hopefully you learn from my mistake and instead of writing the two papers, working on the group project, or you know just sleeping you don't go over to a friend's house to watch Moana and eat cake. However, sometimes those kinds of nights are very much needed. Just remember that the more you study now the less studying you will have to do during finals week because you won't be trying to relearn the material.