Adam

Enjoy the uncomfortably lame play on words I put into the title of this post, because it’s going to be a serious one. As finals week approaches (which I just figured out to be a little over a week from today-the long winter break had me confused), study spaces around campus fill up with students learning (or, hopefully relearning) everything covered over the frigid semester. You’ll also see paper cups of coffee, cans of Redbull, lazy-mood sweatpants, Pinterest scrolling, and giant headphones. The rule of thumb is that the more you bring along to play with while studying, the less you’ll actually learn. My advice? Keep your study times shorter and more productive.

This isn’t a suggestion directed towards someone who can actually focus on studying for long hours at a time. If you can stay up all night focusing on organic chemistry and actually learn, you’re way ahead of the game. For the rest of us (like this semi-ADD stricken blogger), instead of having long periods of time switching between Facebook and mindlessly copied lecture notes, try limiting how long you study. Take what you could casually study in two hours and cram it into one. Then allow your brain to process the information for an hour while you do something you enjoy.

Now obviously, you may not want to study on and off between hours (unless that helps, everyone is different like snowflakes, or whatever we learned about in pre-K), but you can use more condensed study hours as an excuse to indulge in incentives. Go see a movie (there’s a lot of good stuff out right now). Go swimming at the rec. Take the time to go play with some dogs (keep your eyes peeled, they’ll be in the library during or right before finals week). And do all those things knowing that you’ve put in a solid 2-3 hours of uninterrupted and focused work.

This time of the semester is supposed to be stressful, but that doesn’t mean you have to pretend that you’re studying for 8 hours at the library. It means you can make an excuse to play with a doggy.

Keep strong. There’s only 2 weeks left.

-Adam

While our counterparts at Iowa State are graced with a dead week to “study,” we still find ourselves attending class.

Thank goodness.

While it may seem like a drag to not get a whole week off to study at whatever pace you desire, the structure of this last week will probably be doing you a huge favor. Have you ever had a bunch of homework to do over a weekend? Your Saturday’s totally free, so you’ll take care of some of it then, and then the rest on Sunday morning, leaving time for plenty of activities.

Then, 9 p.m. on Sunday’s shown up and you’ve done NOTHING. Things got so busy with the Facebook and the…Facebook. Better rationalize it by complaining about how much work you have on Facebook!

I’m super grateful that this university is forcing me to attend classes. It’s for my own good. Really. I feel like we’re actually lucky to be graced with review sessions so close to finals. Those that have been keeping up with their studies will get a good refresher, and the rest of us will have material to guide our panic-stricken week.

Coffee’s cheap, most of life isn’t. It’s better to not waste study time playing Spent (it’s a pretty enlightening game, I suggest looking it up), study, and then avoid playing Spent in real life (again, you’d really need to play it for a few minutes to understand what I mean).

Good luck,

Adam