First off, let’s take a collective breath in and out together, okay? I’m here to tell you that finals week is a mental and emotional roller coaster for everyone. You are spending so much time and energy on outlines and flashcards. The library has become your second home and you are spending so many hours that there, you are beginning to feel like it is your only home at this point. You become so absorbed in your philosophy, english or science that it is all that you are thinking about the days leading up the exam. You are frantically texting your best friend that you are drowning and that your life is over, and you “can’t do this anymore.”
I’ll give you some advice from my own experiences, both the good and the bad. I’m lucky that the high school that I went to taught me time management. You want to make your planner your best friend. Write down every final, so that you don’t end up showing up to class and forgetting that the exam is that day. I’ve recently discovered this app on my computer that is called stickies. Meaning you can add sticky notes to your desktop in order to keep to do lists of what you need to get done. I made one for all of my finals and their respective dates, and then a list for each day. The daily lists i would put exactly what I wanted to accomplish, whether it be 2 or 3 things so that I could feel productive during my library time.
There were times that I definitely doubted myself, the night before my hardest exam, i found myself on my fourth hour in the library and none of the information was retaining. I made the mistake of continuing to cram information, instead of listening to my gut telling me to stop. What I should have done was leave the library and put my notes away and get a good night’s sleep. What happened was the opposite, I stayed in the library for way longer than I intended. This caused me to still not be able to sleep because I was so worried that my time in the library wasn’t enough and that I knew nothing. Truly, it doesn’t matter how much time you put in, it matters what concepts you teach yourself and what steps you take in order to get to the exam and be able to write some if not all the information down.
I’ll leave you with this, in the grand scheme of the rest of your college career, it doesn’t matter whether or not you ace every final you ever take. When you go out into the real world, companies will not want you less for poor performance on an exam. Companies will want you based on your professionalism, your creativity and your resume that will no doubt be brimming with classes that have prepared you for this track and internship experience that has gotten you to that specific interview.
Let’s take one more collective breath. In and out. You got this.
