How to Pass Your Exams and Still Have a Social Life

Here’s your mistake.

Unless you went to summer school, you ran out of the building in June as if it were a jail break and have been cultivating your sloth for the next two months.

You have taught yourself to sleep late, wear whatever, do nothing much and now you are expected to snap into the regime you escaped three months ago. So it takes you forever to settle down and you can barely keep up with the class.

And it is torture to have to sit inside working over some problem when your mind is somewhere circling Neptune.

By October you hit your stride, so it’s almost manageable save the fact you’ve got to re read whatever it was you did in September.

Just before the break you know what you’re doing, then it’s a couple of weeks of relearning sloth, and then back to the grind, so that it only takes two weeks for you to remember what you’re there for and get back to where you were the first week in December.

By Spring Break you can’t go nuts because you’ve got so much catching up to do, and then it’s a straight line to exams. And you are studying 24/7.

Your social life is tossed around reality like parsley on a salad.

So you see the problem?

During long vac give yourself a heavy reading list. Find out what texts are being used, what books being read, yada yada, and go through them easy and without pressure.

Suppose you’re going to do Romeo & Juliet. So you see the movie, you read about it on Wiki, and you read the play. This won’t take you a day.

Suppose you’re going to do World History from 1800 to 1900. Get up in the morning and read for at least an hour. Every day. Every day of your vacation at least one hour, sometimes two, is devoted to no pressure study. You read ahead as if it’s a comic book.

What you don’t understand, you don’t understand. Jot it down. When school starts, since you’ve already read everything you could, your homework will be a breeze. You already sort of got the answers and another skim of the chapter is all you need.

This means that you’re going to have a lot of free time. Use the pre-winter break to read what you hadn’t, reread what you didn’t get. Meanwhile, you can enjoy your weekends. They aren’t loaded with work, you’ve done most of it already, so Friday evening should be all the time you need to clear everything due Monday Morning.

So you have plenty of time for all the fun stuff.

As you creep closer to midterms, well, you’re actually reviewing what the rest of the class is reading so the pressure is off. You can get up in the morning, do a bit of study, then have the day, and then, maybe just before dinner, do another scan, and you’re done.

You can focus on the areas that give you problems, but it’s not like you’re ‘new’. You saw this stuff in July. By the time it’s finals where everyone is studying and getting nervous, you’re relaxed and enjoying life.