We’re back from the mid-term break and finals are already around the corner! You know it’s time to get back into the grind after what you’d like to think was a useful mid-term.
Hitting the books again is hard, even after something as relatively short as a week-long break. But it must be done. Here’s the entire process for you, simplified into 5 stages, so that you can fully acknowledge what you’re in for.
1. Making Lists
This is by far the most fun stage of them all. Making detailed timetables, organizing your calendar, USING POST ITS!
When you know you have a lot of work to do, planning every stage is the most invigorating and hopeful stage in the entire process! It also happens to be one of the only points where you feel like you have everything in order…
2. First Week: Things Fall Apart
This is the point where you realize that maybe you weren’t all that equipped to do three readings and an essay on your first day back from break. Things don’t look good.
It might be a good time to start procrastinating since you are not motivated to do anything anyway. The work can be done tomorrow!
Wait, how do you hold a pen again?
3. Ready, Get Set, Procrastinate!
You realize you need a bit of a break after your vacation so you indulge in everything other than the work you have to do. It’s lurking around the corner but as long as it’s not due right this second, it can’t do any harm. Right?
4. Panic Mode: ON
Time has obviously flown by before you could get around to working on anything and your moment of desperation has arrived. As finals week approaches, due dates arrive and readings begin to pile up, and you begin to wonder whether procrastinating was the best choice (HINT: It wasn’t. But that won’t stop you from doing it over and over).
You enter panic mode and begin spending what’s left of your time buried in the books.
Your new motto becomes: Eat, Sleep (which you don’t actually have time for), Nerd, Repeat.
Don’t forget, though, that you can always check out these study spaces on campus if you ever need a change of location!
5. Show Time
The moment of truth (and action) is here and the entire week passes by in a whir that can be aptly summed up by this GIF:
You somehow manage to get through all your papers and submissions without (externally) falling apart. As the week comes to a close, you officially begin winding down and recuperating.
Unfortunately, you can only reach that last dream stage of relief once you finish this entire process (don’t kid yourself, you know it’s going to happen). So buckle up and push yourself through the final ride of this academic year! It won’t be easy but you still have some time to get a head start!
Then again, the 5-stage process is what you’ve been doing your entire academic life, so who am I to suggest a change in tradition?
Edited by Rangoli Gupta
Gifs curated by Prakriti Sharma