Caerus

1. Think about your grade

And don’t just think about it, go over the questions you had on the exam and evaluate whether you got them right or not. Then add up all the points in your head, and actually calculate your grade. The accuracy of this method will manage your expectations and give you the clarity you need.

But don’t stop there. Take the grade you just calculated and work out the end grade too. If you passed, don’t start celebrating just yet. Keep in mind that the teacher might actually hate you and use that sentiment against you. If your end grade turns out to be insufficient, then email your teacher proactively (even if he does hate you). Do this as soon as possible (what they call ‘ASAP’). In the unfortunate event that the teacher doesn’t reply within 24 hours, send him or her a reminder and add “urgent:” to the subject line. This will catch their attention better than any UCG poster ever could. Whatever you do, make sure you pass the course somehow, so you can move on to more methods of unwinding.

2. Start studying right away

The whole year through, we’re busy studying: readings, assignments, presentations, exams, they all keep us busy. Sometimes, we have so much work that we can’t possibly do everything and we focus on what needs to be done to pass a course. But because we focus so much on the things we need to know to pass, we might miss information that might be important later on.

Are you completely sure you won’t need that one difficult formula you skipped in mathematics next year? What if everyone in next year’s class knows how to use it except you? Are you absolutely certain that one function of that one obscure part of the brain won’t be important in your future courses? Perhaps you should study them just in case. Lucky for you, there won’t be any classes or other assignments to distract you from catching up with your work for more than two months! So why not use that class-free time to focus fully on your studies? After all, there is no better way to prepare yourself for next year, right?

3. Thought privacy

UCG is like a family; everyone is really close. We share living spaces, we share study places, we share mental places, we share place places even. Don’t you agree then that it is amazing how we all survived another year? At UCG, basically nothing is private. We all know each other and we know what everyone does. And if we don’t, we just ask.

Now that it is finally summer, now that we’ve finished our last few courses, we can finally say goodbye to that. You have freedom now. Freedom of thought! Isn’t that what Martin Luther King fought for? With this freedom comes privacy. You don’t have to share anything anymore, so don’t!

Keep everything to yourself. Don’t share that stuff anymore. We all have good thoughts and bad thoughts, right? We all want to share those from time to time. But that’s how they get ya. It’s like Facebook asking you How is your day? We all know Facebook don’t give a damn. They just want that juicy info for ads. Same goes for all your friends. Every single one of them wants to be Facebook and suck away your privacy. Know everything about you to sell you out for advertisement money.

Fight that. If you have something hard to deal with during your summer, don’t share. Just think about it yourself. If you have something fun to do during summer, don’t share. Just think about it yourself. Have depressed and lonely thoughts, don’t share. That’s what they’re looking for.

Some of the best advice for those few months where you might not see your friends as much as you do in the rest of the year is to not share your thoughts with them. You do that enough during the remainder of the year. Keep to yourself now. So, how was your day?

4. Avoid social interaction at all costs

You are not the only one in your class who had exams and essays this last block. This means that your friends and peers will probably have one or two things to share with you about their academic activities. This is of course highly undesirable. Chances are, they talk about all the answers they were sure about on questions you might have been very unsure about. Social interaction after exams will only lead to more uncertainty for you about your grades, you do not want that, do you? Besides, not talking to others is also good when their exams or essays did not go so well. It saves you having to give them emotional support during these times, doesn’t that sound smart?

5. Stay in discomfort

A year of academic stress, drama, failures and successes, and the occasional mental breakdowns, has come to an end. Your instinctive thought is probably to unwind and chill. For a while now, summer has been lifting its short skirt to you as you were studying for your finals, flirting with you while you were buckling down, enticing you with its promises of material and transient happiness. Such promises of happiness often, if not exclusively, come hand in hand with evil substances such as alcohol or the narcotic known as cannabis. However, my fellow classmates, do not let the summery siren’s bewitching songs paralyze your reason and lure you into your death. Because that’s what summer can be, your death, or your rebirth depending on your choices.

You can follow the sensible advice of my fellow writers and catch up on your work, avoid social interactions, and all the brilliant aforementioned ideas they suggested for you, and be ready in September for a better year, with a better you. But you can also give in to temptation and go to a party and consume alcohol or smoke the devil’s lettuce in an attempt to ‘unwind’ and create a comfort zone for you. But I’ll tell you this much, comfort will lead to your death. Maybe not your physical death, but the death of your creativity, of your ideas and ambitions, the death of your reason after you’ve distorted it with those evil substances, the death of your growth. The death of what makes you, you. Only when we are out of our comfort zone, dealing with life’s problems sober, taking it as it is and learning from it, do we grow. Do not get comfortable, do not ease your stress, and avoid substances that may help you do that. Stay in discomfort and anxiety and continue to grow.