You know your life has gone full circle when you find yourself once again at the heart of the hustle and bustle that is the revision period. It seems to be the only sure way to prove: a) you’re getting older and b) there’s a lot you haven’t done in the year.

Which is mostly the case when you’re studying something like a humanities topic, where in the beginning of your first term you where pretty much advised to spend blah blah amount of time on reading. This is even worst if it’s your first year where all your graduated 20-something-year-old friends squeal “It’s piss easy!” only to find things are much more confusing than you thought it could be.

From then on, there were two roads we could have gone down.

One would be the path of obligatory reading where we grudgingly read through everything despite how tedious the set texts where, scribbled notes that were half-gibberish, half-legible, yet managed to say absolutely nothing during the early-morning seminars. However, seeing that having a short attention span is one of the hidden requirements for being a student; most of the time we ended up taking the second route. We’re all somewhat familiar with this route even if we do begin with the path of obligatory reading.

It’s the second road, the other route that you begin going down when one exasperated part of our brain says “Sod this, I’m going to the pub,” and we end up thinking that right until the beginning of spring. Right along this time we get two more paths we could follow. Your brain could decide its time to wake up from hibernation, which suddenly throws you into the realisation there’s so much to do between now and the exams in May, and you start pacing yourself towards the exams by downloading past papers getting books and trying to sort out your notes before April.

Another option would be that when you finally receive your exam timetable in late March, you panic and end up getting any and every book you can find which relates to your topic. It’s during this time that you will be repeatedly bombarded with the realisation you pretty much slept through half the teaching year and have around five weeks to understanding six months worth of material. This is made worst if your university library is crap and the only decent library is miles away in West London. Even if you did start revising early you soon get the revision blues, convinced that everything you’ve studied thus far is wrong and the only redeeming feature about revision and exams ahead is wasting your summer on even more pointless activities.

And at the end, the urge to strangle those smiling 20-something-year-old friends is overwhelming.

Comment
alcohol, exams, Student life