Finals.
It’s the most dreaded five-letter word for a college student. The fact that you have a test that is potentially cumulative for a whole semester in a given class, not to mention that you take multiple classes. Sometimes finals week can be easy, depending on your major and what grade you’re in. Some students only have one or two finals, or maybe even none if you’re lucky. Most people aren’t that lucky and usually end up with a few tests during the last week.
While most people paint finals week to be the most miserable time of their lives, with all nighters fueled by RedBull or countless 5 Hour Energy drinks, this is definitely not the case. What some people forget about is that they don’t have classes during finals week. You can wake up whenever you want, so long as you don’t have a test that day, and start studying whenever you’d like to. Now does this mean that you should study all day just cause you have the free time? Of course not, enjoy your day, work out, go to lunch, spend some time with friends. The more you can do to relieve stress for short periods of time the better off you’ll be. Butler even offers ways to take a step back and slow down the whirlwind going through your mind during finals week. They offer a late night breakfast for any student at the dining hall and they gave away a free iPad. The university has brought in puppies for a couple hours to the HRC for students to play with another day during the week if they’d like to. If none of this sounds too appealing to you to relieve stress, think of it like this. Let’s say you’re real ambitious (and I’m saying real ambitious for a college student), you could start studying at 8 am and before lunch you may have studied for 4 hours already. If you take an hour lunch break and start back up at 1 pm, and then study until dinner at 6, that’s another 5 hours. You would have already studied 9 hours in one day, and if you need more time than that to study for a final you still have the evening.
While finals can be stressful, especially when all you want to do is go on winter break, they really aren’t as bad as they seem. Be sure to take the time to have some fun and do things for yourself in order to make the week a little more bearable.
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Ryan Medas