THE PHASES OF PANIC

JUST BEFORE EXAM WEEK

After about 33 years of studying, I am a seasoned exam taker. Or rather, I mean that I have taken a lot of exams. The way I approached those exams still requires some improvement, but it's too late for that now. I was a panic student. The whole semester I breezed through life only to completely freak out two weeks before D-Day because hello, how am I EVER going to cram eight weeks of material for six different subjects into my head? Year in and year out it went like this, and not just for me.

It starts with you being completely convinced that everything is going to be fine. “Okay, I have notes from the lectures, I can borrow summaries from my classmates, and I have the PowerPoints. I’ll study one day for all the lectures, then the summaries, and I’ll quiz myself with the PowerPoints. Piece of cake!”

Then it turns out that the lectures were freaking difficult and the summaries alone are a thousand pages. “Okay, breathe in, breathe out, this can still work out. Just sleep a little less and let me skip that party this weekend for now.”

“Okay, breathe in, breathe out, this can still work out. Just sleep a little less and let me skip that party this weekend for now.”

Then you realize that there are certain parts of the material that you just REALLY don’t understand, no matter how many times you read it. “Is it very suspicious if I email the teacher a week before the exam saying that I don’t fully understand a certain thing from lecture 2? Or will I then hopelessly expose myself?”

By now, the week of the exam has arrived and you don’t know where to look from all the craziness. You live in the library, you only consume Red Bull and have acute RSI and cataracts from writing and reading. Panic sets in. “THIS IS NEVER GOING TO WORK.”

For me, there always came a moment when I started to think strategically. “Okay, this exam is impossible. If I skip this one and just study for the resit, then I have all the time and peace to focus on that other exam and at least I won’t have to resit that one. Yes, that’s a good idea. Okay, it will be fine.”

“RED BULL RED BULL RED BULL RED BULL RED BULL RED BULL”

The day before the exam, I navigated between total panic and complete calm. Literally, in one paragraph I thought: “I have all the time” only to get red spots again because “how am I ever going to manage this?” If the exam was after 1 PM, I chose to study until 4 AM, sleep in, and only review my summaries before I had to go into battle. If the exam was at 9 AM, I had to go to bed on time, although it has certainly happened that I literally went through it all without sleep in one go.

Then, exam time. You know the first question, the second one too, you save the third for later and your overall feeling is: “if only I could have studied just one more day, I could have gotten a 9.” But especially don’t think that you’ll carry that realization over, the next exam round you make exactly the same mistakes. Time and time again.

Studying, no one said it would be fun.