Eat My Sandwich

You suffer from so many mixed feelings during exams. For one, you suffer from tension and stress because of the massive information overload you need to go through. (For some reason I always replace 'have' with 'need' in all my sentences. I blame call centre training for that - "If you like our product, you NEED to pay $xx.xx".)

There are random things like sleep schedules and extraordinary circadian rhythms to control in order for you to wake up on time before each exam. Everything needs to be planned and executed perfectly.

You also have to adhere to the wisdom of not studying till the very last minute, which means, even if you pull an all-nighter, you should 'rest' your brain for an hour or so before the exam so that it functions while you are taking the exam. (Please people, you 'take' exams not 'give' them. Your professors are the ones who give you exams.)

You also need to clean your room so that you can organize and file all those random pieces of papers that are your notes taken during lectures and tutorials. It takes time.

Then of course, comes the hard part - studying. You need to make sure you don't have any interesting TV shows to watch on your hard drive so that you don't get distracted while you're studying - so you watch them all; back-to-back.

Once you're done, you open the syllabus, note down exam venues and seat numbers, and sit down with your book; highlighter and pencil in hand.

This is where you realise that all the interesting topics are not in the syllabus and you wonder if they might be related to the topics that are in the syllabus, so you read through them, just to be on the safe side.

Once you run out of interesting things in your book, there is nothing for you to do except facing the music. So you finally begin preparation for your exam. Please note, this is not about a nerd who starts 'revision' at this point. No. This is the first time this student comes into contact with the readings and the lecture slides.

Halfway through the first chapter, you get this immense desire to doodle, and you doodle away. You fight the urge and wonder if inviting your friends to study with you would help. They arrive and you chat away. They soon realize it won't work so they leave after a couple of smokes.

Of course, then you get really hungry so you eat. A brain in action needs nourishment. You are used to having company while you eat so you watch some random TV show episode for the third time while you eat. That's when you get back to your book and finally finish the first chapter.

Then you must sleep, so that you give your mind enough rest to shift all the information from its RAM (random access memory) to the hard drive.

In the process you will of course have nightmares about multiple choice questions (MCQs). Especially MCQs set for a psychology exam. "What if the psychology professor uses reverse psychology on me in setting the questions?"

It's worse when it's negative marking too. "Oh so the professor wants me to think this is the right answer so it's obviously the wrong choice."

You make careless mistakes on all the questions you could've answered correctly and the ones you mark randomly also turn out to be incorrect. You get a minus score on your final for the first time in the history of your university.

I hate exam time.

Labels: All-nighters, Back-to-back, Call Centre, Doodle, Doodling, Exams, Final Exams, Information Overload, MCQs, NUS, Procrastination, Revision, Studies, Syllabus, TV Shows