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Finals Season, As Told By Lord of the Rings

Her Campus Placeholder Avatar Deborah Reddy
This article is written by a student writer from the Her Campus at SFU chapter.

 

If you’re anything like me, finals season is not a time to show off the knowledge you’ve gained throughout the semester; rather, it is a two-week period devoted solely to celebrating the end of classes and procrastinating. By the time the exam date rolls around, however, your lack of focus has made that test paper before you no less fear-inducing than facing a Balrog on the Bridge of Khazad-dûm. Not unlike the Fellowship’s quest, the road to exams often feels like walking into the fires of Mordor. So, with that in mind, here is my rendition of what finals season looks like, with a little help from Lord of the Rings.

 

After classes are over, but before the finals actually start, there are final assignments and papers to get through. You know, because four back-to-back exams at the end of the semester aren’t causing you enough tears already.

 

So, you start by setting ambitious daily essay goals, like writing four paragraphs a day, but then, you go from browsing JSTOR to browsing Netflix because you realize, Hey, you’ve got three whole days before your paper is actually due!

 
 
And as if starting How to Get Away with Murder and re-watching all ten seasons of Friends wasn’t enough of a waste of time, you begin looking for other ways to delay the writing process.

 

Next thing you know, though, it’s the day before the due date, and your only option is to power through the next twelve hours in order to avoid an all-nighter.

 

But before you know it, it’s 4 a.m. and you’re still not done. The sentences start to blur and your arguments become incomprehensible.

 
 
And so, hope is abandoned and all that matters now is reaching the word count in any way you know how.

 

You somehow manage to submit the paper just 28 seconds before Canvas marks it late, but now you feel like death.

 

You’re in dire need of some R&R, but then you realize you have to start studying for that same class’s final exam.

 

You aren’t the slightest bit motivated to start studying, so you debate on just winging it, but you quickly realize that finals are a whole other ball game.

 

You lock yourself up in your room to keep from getting distracted, but, after re-reading the same paragraph in the textbook three times, you soon realize that studying on your own is clearly not getting anywhere.

 

So, you enlist some help from your classmates.

 

But they soon realize that your inability to stay focused might be because you don’t understand the material, and so, fearing that you’re a lost cause, they attempt to let you down easy.

 

Before you know it, it’s the night before the exam, and you’ve studied the best as you’ve allowed yourself to. As you go to sleep, you can’t help but be frustrated that you’ve let yourself become so stressed about something as non-life-threatening as a test.

 
 
Regardless, you wake up the next day with the growing fear that you will be crushed by this exam.
 
 
 
You leave home feeling daunted by the task set before you, and you’ve accepted that there is no turning back.
 
 
 
When you sit down to write the exam, your nerves take over, but you decide to write through the anxiety, even though by question 3, you’re ready to give up.
 
 
 
While you’re writing the exam, you can feel the professor’s gaze boring a hole through you. It’s almost as if he can read your mind and see that you haven’t studied half as much as you should have.
 
 
 
Now you’re really ready to call it quits.
 
 
 
So you spend precious minutes calculating how many right answers you need in order to pass the exam…instead of actually answering the questions. If I get six out of ten in this section, then I’ll only need four in that section, right? If I get half right on this question and half right on the next question, how many marks is that?
 
 
 
Now panic sets in, because you’re not sure if you have enough correct answers, and you know what that means.
 
 
 
And you can only imagine what that would mean for your grades.
 
 
 
But you finish the exam to the best of your ability, and when you walk out of the exam room with mere minutes to spare, a weight has been lifted. You feel good, regardless of your pending final grade, because you know that, at this point in time, there’s nothing more you can do except celebrate the fact that IT’S OVER.
 
 
 
And there’s no better way to celebrate than complaining about the exam with your classmates over a pint at the Highland Pub.
 
 
And now, you can give yourself just enough time to take a little breather, before it starts all over again.
 
 
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Deborah is an English major and Linguistics minor with a mild Peter Pan complex. She is an avid tea-drinker and shower singer whose favourite pastime is napping. Her goal in life is to one day touch Harry Styles's hair.