1. Shock
You wander into class just like any other day, flip open your textbook, and take out your notebook in preparation to have a totally normal class. Lectures go on as usual and you are just about to pack up your things when your professor suddenly throws you a curveball, mentioning casually that your midterm, which covers all the material you have learned up to and including today and is 40 percent of your grade, will be next week.
‘What??!!’ you think. It’s barely been a month since I moved in – what have we even learned at this point? You flip through your notebook, noticing that it is thicker and more filled with notes than you had thought it was (after all, the semester JUST started, what, a month ago?).
2. Denial
As you ponder this thought, you remember that it’s Chicken Finger Thursday at Leo’s and you toss your books in your backpack so you can beat the hoards of elementary school kids inexplicably touring the school (Who does college tours in the third grade anyway??) to the front line. There is still almost a week left! You can think about this some other time!! Right???
3. Pain and Guilt
Sometime the following Sunday afternoon while binge-watching Stranger Things for the fifth time, it hits you that you haven’t glanced at your notes a single time since your last lecture, and the email you hoped your professor would send to your class explaining that this whole “midterms” thing was just a scare tactic or a prank is conspicuously absent from your inbox. After frantically glancing at your syllabi for your other classes, you realize that you also have two papers and a presentation, all due within the next four days. The gravity of your situation hits you like a ton of bricks – or more likely, a ton of books.
4. Bargaining
A loud ping! awakens you the following morning, signaling the arrival of an email from your professor. You grasp for your phone, rubbing sleep from your eyes and open it eagerly, but alas, they grimly inform you that they are unable to grant you the extension you pleaded for in your 3am message the previous evening.
But I’m really sick! you explain, coughing halfheartedly and desperately slapping your forehead with the back of your hand, searching for the slightest indication of a fever. My great-aunt Sophia is getting married and I’m in the wedding! No, you would have had to mention that before now. Besides, wasn’t Aunt Sophia in Slovenia? Or was it Slovakia? If you’re an SFS student, you feel a vague discomfort in the pit of your stomach as you recall that you have to take Map of the Modern World next semester. In any rate, you won’t have to know that until AFTER next week, at the very least. Now you’re really desperate. My dog ate… my textbook!
You type out each possible excuse and glare at it for a moment, imagining the professor’s response. You then repeatedly jab the ‘delete’ key with enough ferocity to warrant a concerned glance from your roommate, who is sitting on her bed next to a pile of assignments watching video cooking tutorials for vegan lasagna she will never eat, as the cursors of Google Docs empty of all but her name and a vague essay title blink in the background. Reality finally begins to set in. You’re really going to have to do this.
5. Reflection and Loneliness
You clear away the stack of flyers for on-campus events offering free food that has been quietly accumulating on your desk since move-in day, creating a space roughly big enough for you place your books and your laptop to study. However, after taking one look at the thick stack of volumes whose contents you must dedicate the next several dozen hours to absorbing, you reflexively glance out your window at all the happy people frolicking on Healy Lawn.
You curse the smiling Jesuits and their adorable puppies outside in the sunshine as you open your lecture notes and slowly begin punching out the first words to the essay with the most urgent due date. One step at a time.
6. The Upward Turn
Around 2:30 am, the caffeine and adrenaline in your veins take over and you suddenly begin to make connections you never could have in your usual state. Your thoughts race and your fingers fly over the keyboard, producing strings of words that may or not qualify as sentences. Oh my god, I’m a genius! you think to yourself, oscillating between brief moments of lucidity and much longer stretches of.
7. Cat Videos
Inevitably, you will find yourself watching cat videos at some point during this process. We don’t know how, we don’t know why, but it will happen. When it does, don’t be frightened – simply recognize what is happening before falling down the YouTube rabbit hole, and proceed to Step 7.