Final Push

With exam week upon us, many feel that it's time to get serious, panic, and consider dropping out of school. While this is perhaps not the most constructive train of thought, it is a natural response to trying to read an entire textbook in 12 hours. (Or possibly even less time, depending on how many levels of Super Mario Bros. 3 you were able to beat that same evening). Let's be honest, most of us stopped trying after midterms. I mean, a lot of us stopped trying even sooner. And some of us never even started trying. (Hey, if the teacher wanted my attention the class should not have been scheduled for 8 a.m. …or 10 a.m. … and a 1 p.m. class is tricky because I get sleepy after lunch).

Now all of a sudden, the information that we spent months ignoring has to be learned in a week. It's an unpleasant situation, but I'd like to offer some strategies to decrease stress and anxiety during this grim, trying time.

Ignoring and not showing up for exams definitely curbs the pressures of exam week. But, be warned, this option does have its downsides. For example, if your roommate has an 8 a.m. exam, he might ask you to stop doing beer bongs and screaming along to Now That's What I Call Music 4! when you are just a mere two hours into your anti-exam celebration. Worse yet, he might even have the gall to accidentally wake you up when his alarm goes off at 7 a.m. Talk about irritating!

If you decide ignoring exams isn't for you, there are certainly other ways to lessen the tedium, the headaches and the tightening of the chest that always accompany exam studying. Procrastination is a wonderful tool. It's surprisingly easy to convince yourself you're studying when you're really just wasting your life. Remember the age old adage: As long as you're at a desk and/or computer, you're making progress.

If you have a laptop, move on over and "study" in bed. You'll find that lying down and falling asleep is much more comfortable than sitting at your desk and studying.

Consider compulsively checking your e-mail. Once every 15 minutes should make you feel busy. In the face of studying, anything from Barnes and Noble coupons to e-mails offering eternal youth in exchange for your credit card number can be worthwhile. However, this is not the best strategy to avoiding work. Stores, friends and con artists can only send out so many e-mails. There are few things as demoralizing as checking an empty inbox 12 times in a row.

I'd recommend moving on to a more personal, yet still removed, form of online communication: reading AIM away messages. This year, I implore everyone to please put up an amusing - or at least long - away message. Putting up a plain and simple message that says "studying" is completely insufficient. Think about it. That message is not interesting, and it takes about one second to read. And here I am trying to procrastinate. Thanks for nothing.

Give me an amusing quote, a YouTube link, the PSYC221 exam questions you swiped from the teaching assistant while explaining to him or her the illness/family emergency/secret spy mission that made you absent for the past month. Anything works, just put some effort in!

Study breaks are a great strategy. Convince yourself you need coffee to stay awake and read. But you can't just have homemade coffee; you deserve a treat because you're so stressed. Take a trip to Starbucks to get a sugary, milkshake-flavored coffee. And because the atmosphere is so inviting, curl up on one of their soft chairs. If you happen to fall asleep for four hours, well, hey, that's just your body's way of saying you really needed that coffee break.

If you've exhausted other procrastination options, you can begin to delve into actual schoolwork. But be cautious. Start by looking at past test scores and tally up your grade in that class thus far. Then plug in some hypothetical grades and see how badly you can do on the exam to still get a B … or a D. This little exercise can do wonders for alleviating anxiety. (Warning: If you discover you need more than 100 percent on your final to pass a course, stress may increase dramatically).

While these methods may not (read: certainly won't) help you get better grades, they will, at least temporarily, keep you from facing the mountains of work that have been building up since September. Nothing relieves schoolwork-related stress better than not doing schoolwork.