My Finals Experience This Semester

Hey everyone it’s been a while! I know in my last post I said I was going to be taking a week off of writing to focus on my finals. Well after an insane week of studying, writing papers, and doing projects, I decided to take another week off to allow myself to simply veg and not have to worry about opening my laptop. Partially I made this choice for myself however, due to my hectic week prior when Monday rolled around I was just too drained to write. But I’m back now and better than ever! This brings me to my topic for this week: My finals experience.

If I’m being honest with you all, finals week is the most draining week of the year for me. I put a lot of pressure on myself to do good in school and get very freaked out at the idea that one test could ruin my entire grade in a class (and thus my GPA for the semester.) With that being said, I think it is important to start this blog post off by saying the one thing I learned from finals week is that one exam does not define how smart you are. For me, my strong suits are writing papers and doing projects. Studying for tests and taking exams are the reason that my grade drops during finals week. Everyone has their strengths and weaknesses when it comes to school and that is totally okay

Now to start off, my finals week lasted December 13th - December 21st (which is absolutely horrendous) but the week prior to that was the week that really took a couple of years off my life. December 13th was the last day of classes at my school and for some reason, every professor I had decided to assign 1-2 projects, papers, or exams to be due on that day. I had a total of seven assignments due at midnight on that Monday and genuinely had no idea how I was going to complete them. And these assignments weren’t a walk in the park either. All had some sort of extensive directions to them. I had to write a paper on ancient rhetoric, make up a fake survey and explain all of the parts of it, and make an entire website about my credentials as a future employer all in the span of a week. So as any stressed 20-year-old does, I called my mother in a panic.

Basically, the entire phone call consisted of me telling her I was dropping out of school and how much I hated college (obviously this was not true, I was simply being overdramatic.) After my mom basically talked me off of a ledge, I started working on my assignments. One by one I finished them and began to feel calmer and calmer. However, this calmness was extremely short-lived when I woke up in the middle of the night that Wednesday having a panic attack over my schoolwork. I have had anxiety for as long as I can remember but things like this only happen to me when I get extremely stressed out. I was up from 4 a.m. - 8 a.m. just trying to control my breathing and telling myself that finals are not the end of the world. And to make matters worse, I worked myself up so much that I somehow made myself sick. I had chills, aches, and a headache which I am assuming is from both stress, and lack of sleep from the night prior. So against my better judgement I spent all of Thursday not touching a single assignment and simply relaxing and taking a day to myself. This absolutely KILLED me because the entire time I was on the couch or in my bed I so badly wanted to just study or do an assignment but I knew for my mental state that I had to have this day off.

And miraculously I woke up the next morning feeling a million times better and ready to get back on track. I spent the rest of the weekend finishing up all of my assignments and passed everything in on time on Monday which I was pretty proud of. However, I still had three exams that I needed to survive before I could truly relax. The first exam that I took was my hardest. It was for my research methods in communication class and the first day of classes my professor looked at us all and said that nobody would pass the final at the end of the semester which only fueled my fire of wanting to pass it even more. I spent two days in the library studying with my friends in the class and walked into the exam feeling confident about my grade.

Well, that confidence was very short-lived the minute I looked at the first question on the exam. And after a solid 40 minutes of stress, I turned in my exam accepting defeat. Afterward, I was talking to my friend Cecilia about the exam and she told me to expect the worst so I wouldn’t get disappointed. Now, this was fantastic logic however my version of “worse” was getting a 65% so later that night when I got my grade back and saw I got a 59%, I was beside myself. All of those hours in the library were wasted for absolutely nothing and I was pissed, to say the least. I allowed myself to be upset about it for the rest of the night but pulled myself together for the following day because I had a statistics final in the morning.

Now math has never been my strong suit and this class was very difficult but for some reason, I chose to study for maybe an hour for this exam. It was an online and open note exam and something was telling me that everything would be okay. There was no way I would do worse than 59% so my brain just said “screw it” and went in blind. Miraculously I ended that final with an 83% and ended the class with an A- which is something I never would have expected out of myself.

My last final was my ancient rhetoric class and this was one where I also wasn’t all that nervous for. This was a 30 question exam where all I needed to do was memorize a bunch of terms and rhetoricians. I also wasn’t able to take it until the 21st of December so I had a good 5 days to spend with my friends before we went on break. I saw the new Spider-Man movie, celebrated my friend Gabe’s 21st birthday, and just spent the week talking and having fun. This break was definitely needed and gave me enough time to recharge from all of the work I did for the past two weeks.

When it finally came time to start studying for this exam, I spent the night with Ava, who was also in my class, going through a Quizlet in the parking lot of Sonic. Honestly one of the most iconic moments we have shared together. But like the statistics exam, studying for this one was pretty easy and I ended with a grade of 85% which I will absolutely take.

All in all, I am extremely proud of myself and the work I put in for this semester. I finished with a 3.9 GPA which has never happened to me before and for my first semester fully in-person since COVID, I think I will consider that a win in my book. I think that the biggest thing I learned from my finals experience this semester is that breaks from work and studying are essential. As much as school is important, so is mental health and nothing is worth more than your mental health. As much as I am looking forward to next semester, I am excited to take the time during winter break to relax and take some time for myself whether that be me writing, going out, or even just spending time with my family. I’m sure I’ll have tons of great winter break blog posts so stay tuned for that! I know this was a pretty short post but I have been struggling with writers block this week and hopefully next Monday I'll have a bit more inspiration.

I hope you all have a lovely week!

- Meg