It’s crunch time, guys. This is the part of the year where the campus divides itself into two distinct factions: the Tortoises and the Hares.
“Wait I thought that was a children’s book.” IT IS. Gotta teach those suckers hard life lessons early. The Tortoises are the group that will spend the rest of the semester stressing out all the time about how much work they have left. They move slowly, keep a steady study pace, and end up with great GPAs and the promise of future employment.
The Hares party. All the time. They may not end the semester in the stellar way the Tortoises will, but they’ll have damn good stories about what happened between the start and the finish.
I am a Hare.
To the Tortoises: Everyone else is just as busy as you are. We’re all freaking out. This is not the time to turn that terror into a competition to make yourself feel better.
To the Hares: Use Easybib.com. Just don’t use it to cite Wikipedia. We’re lazy, but let’s have SOME standards.
Tortoises, find time to relax. Read a book. Get out and enjoy the sunshine. Fountain hop a little. And remember that real life is either going to be way worse than finals, or way easier than finals. So either this is the best things WILL EVER BE, or it’s all uphill from here. I think that both of those are good reasons to celebrate!
To the Hares, I have a couple of suggestions about how to be enough like a Tortoise to get through the semester without your grades completely plummeting. For one, I like to play drinking games WHILE I study. Every time I get a flashcard right, I drink. It’s a really successful game with an awesome incentive. And it works for like 45 minutes. After that I like to play a game at about 6:00 the next morning called, “CRAM, WOMAN, CRAM!!”
Another trick: In Physics, the answer is probably Newton. In WGS classes, the answer is probably Foucault. In Philosophy classes, the answer is probably, “It depends on how you look at it because nothing’s real anyway.”
When you do get to the point of cramming, you’re probably doing it after four days of binge drinking and way too much junk food. You’re going to want to sleep. Don’t do it. Red Bull and coffee are your friends. Do 3 shots of Five Hour Energy instead of one. You’ll do the work of 15 hours in one intensely unstable evening!
And if you think you might fall asleep, put yourself in situations where there is no way you could sleep, even if you wanted to. I recommend studying in your apartment when you know your roommate’s going to be making sweet love to their out-of-town honey. Your body will be so put off by the awkward that it won’t even think to pass out on you! Listen to obnoxious dubstep. Study in places like crematoriums, if you have access to them. Nothing will keep you up like fear of accidental pre-mortem incineration!
No matter how you get there, you’re all going to finish the race. It’s just about style, at this point. Whether you’re a Tortoise or a Hare, we’re all Paladins. Keep calm, carry on, and trip the other guy just before the photo finish, if you have to. Good night, and good luck.
