How I Manage to Survive Finals Week

Things one should do to stay sane during finals:

• create a study plan. plan out exactly what you're going to do and when you're going to do it.


• study in quiet places.


• build breaks into your study schedule.


• get exercise. making time to go to the gym will decrease your stress and increase your focus.


• eat regular healthy meals.


• get enough sleep.

Things I do during finals:

• do work only when a wave of determination and/or panic threatens to drown me.


• "study" outside with a group of friends while discussing the weather.


• get sunburned on my shoulders and back.


• spend at least an hour trying to calculate my chances of getting melanoma.


• determine that I may as well write my last will and testament and watch another documentary about gastric bypass surgery.


• when the sunburn begins to itch at 11 at night, spend a half hour trying to find a ruler to use to scratch.


• decide that the ruler cannot satisfy the incessant itching. text the mom of my friend group. find out that she's just down the hall. run down said hall half naked with a bottle of lotion. enter the mom's room without knocking while begging "please make the itching stop!"


• use the reading strategies that my SAA (Student Accessibility Advocate) to finally read that book I was supposed to finish two weeks ago.


• love my SAA even more.


• somehow manage to turn in all three of my projects on time even though they were all due on the same day.


• throw myself a one person dance party.


• think about going to the gym. realize that I have way too much to do. watch gastric bypass documentaries instead.


• begin to feel extremely homesick. tell everyone within earshot that although I never want to leave Oberlin College, if I have to spend another day in Oberlin, Ohio, I might turn into an albino squirrel.


• try to find excuses to text my dad because I miss him and am worried that his absent-minded brain will forget to come get me at the end of the week.


• find out that the car is broken and that he may in fact fail to come get me.


• panic.


• have an albino squirrel and a blueberry muffin at Slow Train for brunch every day.


• in between gastric bypass documentaries and online games, write a film paper.


• stay up so late writing a sociology paper that my roommate begins to worry.


• finish said sociology paper.


• get an email from my father confirming that the car is fixed.


• resume breathing.


• skip dinner but go to fourth meal every night and laugh with my friends for hours at a time.


• realize that my friends will love me even if I need gastric bypass surgery, get skin cancer, or fail all of my classes. and that's all that really matters.


• blog about it.