You sit down in Ladd Library to study for your final. An hour in and you start to lose motivation. You open the New York Times Connections. You refresh your email. You refresh Lyceum and stare at all the assignments. Thoughts race through your head: which assignment should I start first? Am I behind on this essay? Should I keep working or can I take a break?
The strategies for how to succeed and make it through finals week often don’t cross my mind when I am halfway through an assignment, and already stressing about the next assignment. Therefore, I have decided to create an acronym to help people remember what to do when they find themselves losing motivation and struggling to get through the next two weeks. What better acronym to use than the words ‘finals week’ itself?!
F- Find a new study spot. This one may seem obvious, but it is easier said than done. Sometimes I find myself losing concentration, and instead of trying to switch up where I am studying, I continue to try to force myself to focus. Continuing to study when you are zoning out every minute or switching between tabs on your computer, isn’t productive, and once you catch yourself, you can actually fix this! Try moving to a different section of the library! Or maybe work at your desk in your room? I find that the Den is a great and underrated spot to work.
I- Information is available. When you are stuck, remember all the resources that you have! Not only do you have your old slide presentations and notes, but you have access to Course Attached Tutors (CATS), as well as office hours with your professors. Oftentimes when I am stuck on an assignment, I find it easier to avoid it and continue to put it off. Going to a CAT or office hours right away, can keep you on track to succeed.
N- Nourish and stay hydrated. Keeping your meal times consistent, even if you think you need to keep working, can help you keep up good habits. Also, remember that you can have snacks during the day! Gum can be super helpful, while it doesn’t really sustain you with energy throughout the day, it can help you concentrate. Hydration is always super important; you may be so busy typing that you forget to drink water, so remember to take a step back and ask yourself if you’ve had a sip of water.
A- Acknowledge that this is hard and that everyone is going through it together. Talking to your friends and ranting about some of this stress can help you realize just how much you aren’t alone.
L- Limit phone use. One strategy that my friend came up with for this is “phone jail.” I do this with my friends sometimes and it involves putting both of our phones in a separate area that is hardly visible to us. Just having your phone near you can sometimes cause you to grab it when you need to google something for an assignment. However, you will likely open your phone, see a text, respond to that, and then forget the reason you were on your phone in the first place. Removing your phone from the equation entirely will inevitably help you. Additionally if you decide to take a break on your phone, set a real time limit, otherwise you might fall into the trap that many people (myself included) do, and say “5 more minutes and then I’ll close Tik Tok.”
S- Start working! Starting the assignments that you are putting off because they aren’t as fun and are causing you more stress, can actually help you. If you even open the Lyceum assignment, read the instructions, and jot down some brief ideas, this will likely ease your stress. Simply finishing and perfecting work for the classes you enjoy, and saving the hard assignments for the last minute, can result in way more stress than is necessary. If you make sure to start the harder assignments, you will likely feel better.
W- Work together. Working alone helps some people focus better, but even just working in an environment where other people are studying can help motivate you. If you sit across from someone and see them also concentrated on their work, this will probably motivate you to do the same thing. Studying in groups for certain finals can also be super helpful, as if you set up study sessions with this group, this will block out time, and hold you accountable to working on studying for that final a little bit each day.
E- Envision success. If you have struggled in a class a lot during the semester, don’t count yourself out for the final! While it might be easy to say “I’ll likely do really bad on that one,” this won’t put you in the right mindset to study. Additionally, if visualization helps you, you can even do some visualization exercises before you fall asleep. You could close your eyes and picture yourself sitting down to take the final. Then you could see yourself smiling as you look at the questions and realize that they are all things that you studied. This may sound silly, but it will likely help you go into the test less nervous, and more confident.
E- Explain concepts to your friends or stuffed animals. You can ask at lunch if one of your friends minds listening to you explain a concept from your Neuroscience class. Saying something out loud is a great way to realize what you know and don’t know about a subject. If your friends are busy, or if you don’t want to bother them too much, even explaining a concept to your stuffed animal can help. While your fluffy penguin might not respond back, just feeling like you have an audience can help.
K- Keep track. While this is the last letter in the acronym, I think it is one of the most important. Keeping track of what each of your assignments are, and when each assignment is due, can allow you to focus on what is due sooner! For example, I know I have a lot of big finals next week, but I keep forgetting about the mini-papers that I have due this Friday. Seeing these assignments written out earlier, can prevent me from getting so bogged down by my bigger finals, that I only remember this Thursday night what is due on Friday!
