Diving into Dead Week

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Finals are fast approaching, use the time wisely.

You may be aware some places are stretching Earth Day into Earth Week. I think this is a great idea. One Earth Day no longer subsides my guilt when I peel off 10 K-Cup lids and empty those Tupperware shot glasses into my coffee maker. I swear it tastes better.

Somewhere along Halloween was also stretched into a thing called Dead Week. The key difference is instead of dressing like the dead, we get ready to join them. There are a few strategies I’ve seen work when preparing one’s own funeral.

The first is to shut yourself in. Trade in your sun for some studying and really hit the books. Sure, you have six tests, but you have another week to prepare. Surely that’s enough time to get comfortable with the material, and once you really know it you can apply that knowledge in the real world. This strategy is very effective at raising confidence when abandoned in the first two hours.

The tried and true strategy is to not realize how bad you are at a subject until the night before. You thought the unit was just the three topics you had down, and selective amnesia got rid of the other seven. How did your life get to this point? How did you let yourself put it off this long? Jesus Christ, it’s like two in the morning and the exam is at eight in the morning. It’s not even your only exam tomorrow.

The last and maybe the boldest strategy is to accept your fate, whatever that means to you. Laugh it off and don’t study. Worst case, you walk out in the middle of the exam and never come back. Maybe you make your peace with retaking it next semester and turn off your morning alarm. Maybe you drop out and move to Hollywood to pursue your dream of opening a small business. There’s plenty of cheap labor from high school dropouts who can’t act.

Whatever strategy works for you, try to keep in mind what you in five years will care about. It won’t be calculus or worthless electives. That being said, nobody tells me what to do. Especially that rat bastard. I don’t plan on failing my finals, but a mirror with the poop emoji in the middle tattooed on my palm should show him.

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