While Thanksgiving marks the beginning of the holiday season in some parts of the world, here it marks the beginning of the dreaded midterm season. And while very few students actually enjoy being tested on their studies, my past 2 years at Western have taught me some great ways to get through it all somewhat unscathed.
I'm still wishing on perhaps finding the secret to exam success one day, but until I find it, I'm going to have to rely on a few tips and tricks.
Firstly, hyperorganization works wonders. Exam schedules are rarely organised to evenly spread out all exams and one can often find themself writing 3 or 4 in a week. So to avoid cramming for 24 hours between each one, I've decided to make study schedules to divide up all the material I need to cover. And so far, it's working...
Secondly, multitask. And no I don't mean multitask in a studying, texting, facebooking sort of way, that probably won't help. But more of a workout, listen to music, watch TV sort of way. I'm quite sure that combining 3 ways to combat exam stress all at once works better than doing any of them alone. Fortunately, whoever designed the Western Student Rec Centre had this in mind. They cleverly placed large plasma screens in front of the treadmills and installed iPod compatible cables to match when the facility was finished 2 January's ago and I couldn't be more happy. To add icing on the cake, they charge up your iPod too.
Thirdly, it's important to time your caffeine consumption just right. According to my first year chemistry book, caffeine has a metabolic half life of 4-6 hours, which means that after 4-6 hours, only half of that liquid wakefulness is still around to keep me focused on the 500th lecture slide I'm seeing for the night. From personal experience, a coffee at 11pm is majorly a bad idea. (11pm + 5 hours = 4am), reallyyyy bad idea.
5 down, 1 to go!
Vivian
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