The Ten Pillars of Exam Week
This will be the last in my series of posts about my exams. I thought I would round off this part of my life by doing a little guide on the ‘Big Ten Emotions’ that I and I expect everybody else, experiences at one point or other during their final exam episode:
Light-headedness
No matter how determined you are not to drink for the month running up to and including your exams, you will. It is a fact of life, live with it. It will come in three flavours:
- You have been working all day, you get chucked out of the library so continue to work in the local pub. You find that the past papers are impossible and decided that the only way you are going to get to sleep tonight without crying yourself there is to get pissed. Luckily you are in a perfect location to receive your medicine.
- Your friends finish their exams before you. This happens to be on a Friday. You just can't resist helping them celebrate and you discover that this helps (for just one night) to remove the memory of a truly horrific 55 hours of exam hell.
- Your housemates moan at you about the half finished bottle of Amarula that has been in the fridge door taking up valuable "cheese space" so to shut them up you take the bottle up to your room and drink alone while watching Cruel Intentions.
Sabotage
It the last thing that you need or expect but you need to be prepared for the fact that one or more of your lecturers will try to sabotage your attempts to acquire a degree. This can come in the form of a lecturer spending 5 minutes at the beginning of each and every lecture boasting how difficult his module is and that 85% of past students achieve between 55 - 60%. When you question him on the remaining 15% your last remaining drip of hope is wiped away as he replies: "They fail".
Gratitude
You may (if you are lucky) be blessed with the most supportive, funny and hardworking 'Study Buddy' known to mankind. She won't laugh at you when you are fighting back the tears. She won't shout at you when you are distracting her from revising even though she has the same horrific exam schedule as you and an essay to do on top of it all. She won't be mad at you when you order the wrong the food for her at lunch because your mind is as cognitive as a piece of strawberry jelly. She won't let on to you that she knows more than you before entering the exam, instead telling you that she "knows nothing", just to make you feel more confident. Most importantly of all she won't take offence when you tell her that your best mate just asked if she smelt after being locked in a room for 11 hours. Just remember to say..... THANKYOU!
Anger
After four exams out of five you will be ready to give up, but you must continue to push more information into your brain for that last exam. You will feel the sensation of your blood boiling when you are sat in the library and there are 1st and 2nd years in every direction talking, laughing, kissing, dealing drugs(oh yes!). Resist the urge to 'beat them to a pulp' and also the urge to buy drugs.
Fear
You may find yourself sitting in your first exam having entered the exam hall thinking how you can rescue a 1st after a truly shocking dissertation only to exit the same exam thinking that it will be a miracle if you pass. One phrase will be going around and around and around in your head:
"No Degree --> No Job --> No Melbourne --> No Extreme Breeding"
That is fear.
False hope
You will have one module in which the lecturers are so sadistic that despite having all the lecture notes, 40 pages of revision notes and the course text books you are unable to answer any of the questions on the past paper as the questions are bloody impossible. Do not fall into the state of false hope that they will have set questions inside the course scope this year. You'll discover (to your detriment) on the morning of the exam, that they are still BASTARDS!
Morning sickness
No you’re not having a baby. Well it is most probable that you are not. If you are then that is what revision guides call "bad planning". The reason for exam morning sickness is still unknown to leading scientist in the field, but don't be fooled into thinking that you'll avoid it just because:
- You have never felt sick before an exam in your life before
- You are not nervous about the exam because you are confident you can do all the past papers
- You haven't eaten anything for the last 4 hours.
Rage
It is important that you are very self disciplined when it comes to this emotion. You might find yourself alone in the toilets in your university department only for the lecturer who set the most impossible exam in the history of the universe to walk in. Nobody else can see you and for a moment you think like you are on the set of Scarface and despite being the least violent person on the planet imagine the satisfaction of introducing the so called "Doctor"'s head to the urinal bowl at a large velocity. The thing to remember in this situation is that you "are the least violent person on the planet" so you mumble "hello" and exit the bathroom.
Exhaustion
Fight it, use Coke, use Red Bull, use coffee, use loud music. Sleep might help you revise. But if you are sleeping you are not revising. If you are awake you can revise and when you are revising you are learning. While you are asleep you are not learning, on the contrary, your mind is actually replacing the stuff you learnt with weird dreams about giant penguins who live in East Anglia. At the end there will be plenty of time for sleep.
Distraction
Suddenly EVERY thing else in the world other than your subject becomes amazingly interesting. You may find yourself spending hours in the library reading book that happen to be near you. I would recommend; 'The Large Colour A-Z of Art' and 'Censored - The story of film censorship in Britain'. [The second one might not be suitable for younger readers. Come to think of it the first one had quite a lot of pictures of naked women in it too, so maybe neither are great for younger revisers]
================================
And that's it. It's over. You've never felt such a weight being lifted off your shoulders before. You are on such a high that you don't notice any difference after 6 beers.
Now you can treat yourself to something really special. SLEEP.
=================================
If you have any other emotions that you think I have left out, leave a comment. You never know, in 2034 they might discover the relics of this blog and convert it into a government pamphlet to handout to future students. God help them.
Light-headedness
No matter how determined you are not to drink for the month running up to and including your exams, you will. It is a fact of life, live with it. It will come in three flavours:
- You have been working all day, you get chucked out of the library so continue to work in the local pub. You find that the past papers are impossible and decided that the only way you are going to get to sleep tonight without crying yourself there is to get pissed. Luckily you are in a perfect location to receive your medicine.
- Your friends finish their exams before you. This happens to be on a Friday. You just can't resist helping them celebrate and you discover that this helps (for just one night) to remove the memory of a truly horrific 55 hours of exam hell.
- Your housemates moan at you about the half finished bottle of Amarula that has been in the fridge door taking up valuable "cheese space" so to shut them up you take the bottle up to your room and drink alone while watching Cruel Intentions.
Sabotage
It the last thing that you need or expect but you need to be prepared for the fact that one or more of your lecturers will try to sabotage your attempts to acquire a degree. This can come in the form of a lecturer spending 5 minutes at the beginning of each and every lecture boasting how difficult his module is and that 85% of past students achieve between 55 - 60%. When you question him on the remaining 15% your last remaining drip of hope is wiped away as he replies: "They fail".
Gratitude
You may (if you are lucky) be blessed with the most supportive, funny and hardworking 'Study Buddy' known to mankind. She won't laugh at you when you are fighting back the tears. She won't shout at you when you are distracting her from revising even though she has the same horrific exam schedule as you and an essay to do on top of it all. She won't be mad at you when you order the wrong the food for her at lunch because your mind is as cognitive as a piece of strawberry jelly. She won't let on to you that she knows more than you before entering the exam, instead telling you that she "knows nothing", just to make you feel more confident. Most importantly of all she won't take offence when you tell her that your best mate just asked if she smelt after being locked in a room for 11 hours. Just remember to say..... THANKYOU!
Anger
After four exams out of five you will be ready to give up, but you must continue to push more information into your brain for that last exam. You will feel the sensation of your blood boiling when you are sat in the library and there are 1st and 2nd years in every direction talking, laughing, kissing, dealing drugs(oh yes!). Resist the urge to 'beat them to a pulp' and also the urge to buy drugs.
Fear
You may find yourself sitting in your first exam having entered the exam hall thinking how you can rescue a 1st after a truly shocking dissertation only to exit the same exam thinking that it will be a miracle if you pass. One phrase will be going around and around and around in your head:
"No Degree --> No Job --> No Melbourne --> No Extreme Breeding"
That is fear.
False hope
You will have one module in which the lecturers are so sadistic that despite having all the lecture notes, 40 pages of revision notes and the course text books you are unable to answer any of the questions on the past paper as the questions are bloody impossible. Do not fall into the state of false hope that they will have set questions inside the course scope this year. You'll discover (to your detriment) on the morning of the exam, that they are still BASTARDS!
Morning sickness
No you’re not having a baby. Well it is most probable that you are not. If you are then that is what revision guides call "bad planning". The reason for exam morning sickness is still unknown to leading scientist in the field, but don't be fooled into thinking that you'll avoid it just because:
- You have never felt sick before an exam in your life before
- You are not nervous about the exam because you are confident you can do all the past papers
- You haven't eaten anything for the last 4 hours.
Rage
It is important that you are very self disciplined when it comes to this emotion. You might find yourself alone in the toilets in your university department only for the lecturer who set the most impossible exam in the history of the universe to walk in. Nobody else can see you and for a moment you think like you are on the set of Scarface and despite being the least violent person on the planet imagine the satisfaction of introducing the so called "Doctor"'s head to the urinal bowl at a large velocity. The thing to remember in this situation is that you "are the least violent person on the planet" so you mumble "hello" and exit the bathroom.
Exhaustion
Fight it, use Coke, use Red Bull, use coffee, use loud music. Sleep might help you revise. But if you are sleeping you are not revising. If you are awake you can revise and when you are revising you are learning. While you are asleep you are not learning, on the contrary, your mind is actually replacing the stuff you learnt with weird dreams about giant penguins who live in East Anglia. At the end there will be plenty of time for sleep.
Distraction
Suddenly EVERY thing else in the world other than your subject becomes amazingly interesting. You may find yourself spending hours in the library reading book that happen to be near you. I would recommend; 'The Large Colour A-Z of Art' and 'Censored - The story of film censorship in Britain'. [The second one might not be suitable for younger readers. Come to think of it the first one had quite a lot of pictures of naked women in it too, so maybe neither are great for younger revisers]
================================
And that's it. It's over. You've never felt such a weight being lifted off your shoulders before. You are on such a high that you don't notice any difference after 6 beers.
Now you can treat yourself to something really special. SLEEP.
=================================
If you have any other emotions that you think I have left out, leave a comment. You never know, in 2034 they might discover the relics of this blog and convert it into a government pamphlet to handout to future students. God help them.
posted by Nurton at 2:15 am
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