the different stages of panic

right before exam week

After being a college student for what felt like 33 years, I am a seasoned taker of exams. Or, well, what I mean is that I’ve taken dozens of exams in my mere few years of treading this globe. The method to my madness can still use quite a bit of improvement, but it’s a little too late for that now. I always referred to myself as a panic student. The entire semester was always super chill until the two-week countdown until D-Day. Insert: panic attack. Hello?! How on Earth was I ever going to be able to cram for six different courses with eight weeks worth of information? And this cycle continues, year after year, and I’m not the only one guilty of doing this.

I used to be completely convinced that it would all work out. “Alright, I have notes from all the lectures, I can borrow summaries from other students and I have the power point presentations. I’ll spend one day studying for all the lectures, then I’ll do the summaries and then I’ll quiz myself with the power points. Cat in the bag!”

And then I would realize that the lectures are hard as hell and the summaries included about a thousand pages. “Alright, breathe in, breathe out, it’ll all still work out in the end. I’ll just spend a little less time sleeping and I’ll skip the party this weekend”

“Alright, breathe in, breathe out, it’ll all work out in the end. I’ll just spend a little less time sleeping and I’ll skip the party this weekend”

To realize shortly after that certain parts of the study material is complete gibberish and after re-reading and re-reading it numerous amounts of times, it still made absolutely no sense. “Would it come off a bit suspicious if I were to email my lecturer with a few questions from things I don’t understand from his second lecture? Or is he going to realize my complete and utter procrastination?”

Enter the week of the exam. You’re completely lost and clueless and the library has become your new home. You’re living off of Red Bull. You’ve got an acute case of RSI and cataract from all the writing and reading. Hello panic mode. “IT’S A LOST CAUSE.”

For me, this realization always occurred the moment I started thinking strategically. “Okay, this exam is unattainable. I might as well just skip it and go for the resit. I have plenty of time to concentrate on getting prepped for that one and then I won’t have to take a resit for my resit. Yup, great idea. It’s all going to be just fine.”

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

The day before the exam I was living between complete panic mode and complete serenity. After practically every sentence I would say to myself: “you’ve got this. Don’t sweat it. There’s plenty of time” and mere seconds later I would be thinking “how the hell am I going to be able to cram all this information in?” If I had an exam at 13:00, I would choose to study until 4 AM just to be able to sleep in the day of and do nothing more than read through the summaries before the hour of doom would begin. If I had one at 9 AM, I was forced to go to bed on time, but it’s safe to say I definitely pulled quite a bit of over-nighters.

Enter: the hour of doom. The first question was fine, as was the second, you’re saving the third one for a little later on and your overall feeling is: “if I had just studied a day longer than I could easily passed with an A.” But hey, don’t think this sudden moment of awareness was something you would take along to your next round of exams. Every exam week you get caught in the same nasty cycle and you make the exact same mistakes. Time and time again.

Studying, nobody ever said it would be any fun.