A Timeline Of Your Average Finals Study Session

Whiskey_Ginger12 years ago

You haven’t been to class since the professor handed out the syllabus, except to take the two midterms. Those didn’t go so well because you showed up drunk for one and the other was during your week of protesting North Korea’s military advances by drinking for American solidarity with your pledge brothers. You literally wrote “Fuck Kim Jong-un, he looks like someone filled Short-Round from Indiana Jones with helium,” as an answer on your exam on biomechanics. You are, in a word, fucked, if you do not do well on this final. So, you begin:

5:00 PM, The Afternoon Before The Exam

You finally find a quiet place in the library to study after moving twice, once because the geed next to you decided to blast ’80s hair metal through his earbuds and the second because you walked in on a brother getting a blowjob in the chapter study room. Fucker. At the moment, him enjoying his finals week in any form just pisses you off. So, you settle into a recently vacated spot on the floor where most of the Greeks camp out in the library, and get to work.

5:30 PM

You haven’t even looked at the first chapter of material yet and have updated both your Facebook and Twitter five times. A girl you know across the room is sending you pictures of kittens with motivational phrases to get you to do work, after you explained to her that you just couldn’t focus on your work. The pictures are lame as shit, but it’s obvious she’s into you and it’s never too early to start scouting talent for fall formal. Maybe a short break wouldn’t hurt…

7:00 PM, Back In Your Room

After parlaying your text conversation with said girl into a mid-evening “study break” and teaching her a bit about biomechanics of a different kind, you realize you still have not started studying and your exam is in 13 hours. You head back to the library to try and get some shit done, wondering if maybe taking the class next fall wouldn’t be such a bad idea. After all, then you can just send one of the pledges in your place to take notes.

9:00 PM, Library, Again

Your brother’s “study break” is also over when you make it back to the library. You figure, without the sounds of two people having sex the next desk over and without the distractions of being in a room full of people you’ve blacked out with and girls you’ve hooked up with, something might get done. You poor, naive bastard, how wrong you are.

10:00 PM

You have gone through and completely reorganized your email inbox and deleted all the old messages. You’ve also pretty much planned out dates for socials in the fall and compiled three lists of themes for rush parties, dated socials and daylongs. You haven’t even looked at your biomechanics book. It sits on your desk, untouched. You just can’t bring yourself to open it, as if doing so will unleash some kind of horror, well, at the very least the horror of knowing you’re pretty well boned for the exam in the morning. You have literally done everything else on your to-do list for the next six months, except study. At 10:45, you finally actually open your book. The act of doing so actually sends chills down your spine, and a dark realization of utter hopelessness sets in.

1:00 AM

You have now drank enough Red Bull and gone out for enough cigs that somewhere, the Surgeon General is praying for your health and well-being. As it closes in on 2:00 AM, you’re fairly certain you have enough foreign substances in your blood stream that Hunter S. Thompson is rolling over in his grave. You’ve made it through about a third of the material, though you’re pretty sure you don’t actually understand any of it. You check to see if you got any points for that answer about Kim Jung-un. Fuck. It just says, “See me.”

4:00 AM, Your Room

You finally give in and go to bed. You’ve read all the material, but you remember none of it. You try and sleep. You’re haunted by mechanisms and equations in your dreams — pretty much standard finals nightmares. In a Jaws-like scene, you fight off a chemical structure attacking you on a boat. It’s weird.

7:00 AM, The Exam

It’s two hours of hell. You’re fairly certain you passed by the end of it, but only barely. You should be fine. You’re just glad your long, personal nightmare is at an end…wait, you have three more of these over the next two days.

Two Days Later, 8:30 AM, On The Computer

71 for the semester…I’ll take it. After all, C’s get degrees.