And... We are in the single digits!

Finally! The countdown has started! There are only 9 days of classes left this semester!! Where has the fall semester gone? With dead day quickly approaching comes stress, anticipation, and excitement! Here are a few tips to keep you from getting overly stressed during finals week.

1. Get organized now! Get organized by gathering all your old homework, quizzes, tests, whatever it is that is going to help you study. Check out that syllabus you've probably not even seen since the first day of class and find out what chapters are going to be on your test so you know what to study. Make sure you know if it's comprehensive or just material since the last test!

2. Don't procrastinate. As tempting as it is to relax for an entire week and study all day the day before a test, don't do it! You'll be more likely to remember all that information if you take breaks between studying and you are less likely to feel stressed and pressured to stay up all night before.

3. Prepare. Talk to your professors and see if they can give you some insight on how to study for the test. Obviously it's unlikely they will tell you everything that is on the test, but they are pretty helpful when it comes to guiding you in the right direction so you don't feel like you're going into it blindly!

4. Get plenty of rest. It's my personal goal not to pull a single all nighter this year. Sleeping is when your brain is finally able to rest and recover. Think about it like exercising. If you work out hard every single day of the week and don't take a rest or recovery day, your muscles get fatigued and you won't have as much strength. Think of your brain the same way, if your brain doesn't get to rest, you won't perform as well on the test.

5. Relax. One of my Psychology professors last semester told me about this study that was done on college students who suffered from test anxiety. The experimenters told one group of students to continue to do as most of us do and keep studying until the test began. The other group (in a different room of course) was asked to take the 10 minutes before the test began to write a short paragraph about why they felt nervous or anxious about the test (making them not think about the particular material on the test). After that, the students took the test and were scored. The experimenters found that the students who weren't trying to cram last minute information the 10 minutes before the test actually did better as a whole than the students who were told they could keep studying. Looking through material that quickly and frantically may confuse what you already learned, so it may cause you to second guess yourself and not do as well. So take those last 10 minutes before the test and just relax!


Good luck with finals & happy studying! :)

Yasmeen