Posts Tagged ‘exams’
I’m not panicking, honest.
Posted on: June 1, 2010
So, I’ve been lax with my revision.
I set my alarm for early this morning, but – not having got to sleep until about 7am – failed to get up particularly early. It’s now just gone 10.
I have an exam at 2.
This morning was going to be my last minute cramming session. Not particularly advisable, but trust me, necessary. I’ve been finding it hard to concentrate or focus or remember. Cramming in as much as I can a few hours before the exam is pretty much all I can do.
I went to log on to my modules’ website. Where all the lecture presentations are, and the links to reading.
And I can’t log on. It says I don’t have an account.
Now I’ve got to trawl through textbooks, trying to remember which bits are relevant to my course, and which aren’t. I’ve got less than four fucking hours.
I’m not panicking. But I rather suspect I am failing.
Gaaaah.
Posted on: May 14, 2010
Awake until the sun comes up. Try to sleep. Lay awake for an hour or more. Drift off. Wake up before most sane people’s alarms go off.
I went to my exam. I’ve spent all my time, including that in the exam room, pretty much in denial. This isn’t an exam. I’m not doing exams. This doesn’t count. It can’t. Even when I’ve tried to make it real, tried to make myself care, it’s not quite working.
Things are starting to get a bit bleak again.
Curling up on my bathroom floor, the coldest, darkest, smallest place I can go. Wishing there was somewhere a hundred times colder, darker, smaller. Wanting to compress it all and stuff it in a tiny box so that the rest of the space around me isn’t contaminated. Blankness and tiredness and bone-deep inaction, interspersed with pointless pacing of my room and bursts of tears. What am I doing?
And the ever-approaching creep of death, death, death. Look the other way. Don’t let it consume me. Hum to myself and pretend it’s not there but I know really, and however much I try to hold it at arm’s length, sooner or later it starts to make sense.
Results Day.
Posted on: July 9, 2009
It is now the day I get my exam results. They’re not released for another 9 and a half hours or so. I’m crapping myself with fear.
When I was a kid, results days were great. In the build-up, I’d feel a thrill of excitement because exam results always just told everyone that I was quite clever, mixed with a casual attitude because even if they didn’t, my exams didn’t really matter.
But I’m terrified now. Twitchy and jittery and fidgety. I don’t want to fail – I don’t want to let anyone down, I don’t want to have to resit – but I don’t see how I could have escaped it.
I’m about a million times more nervous for the results than I was for the exams themselves.
Edit: I passed! Not particularly brilliantly (four modules: three at 2:2, one at 2:1), but I passed and I don’t have to resit. I’m so relieved. As ever, my exam results seem completely unconnected to what I actually wrote in my exams – the one I thought I did really well in was my worst result, and the one I thought I couldn’t possibly have passed was my second best result. But it doesn’t matter because I passed and I don’t have to think about anything again until October. Phew.
My exams are over!
Posted on: May 29, 2009
I had my final exam this morning.
I only slept for half an hour last night (well, this morning. It was after dawn [don’t worry, the night before I had about four hours’ sleep, so despite not sleeping at all the night before that, I have in fact recently had some sleep. A little.]).
I think it went okay. I think I wrote a bit too much. 2 hour exam – 15 minutes to plan, 1 hour 45 to write. Pages written: 10. That’s an average of a page every ten and a half minutes. (My talents are wasted. Why aren’t I a mathematician?)
My hand hurts.
I feel good though. My exams are over. I don’t need to worry about them again until results come in and I, possibly, have to start thinking about resits.
My only worry now is when I am next going to sleep.
Super.
Posted on: May 27, 2009
Just a quick post. Everything is still fine, better than fine in fact.
I had an exam today. I didn’t sleep at all last night, spent most of the evening talking, talking, talking, then when everyone went to bed I tried to sleep (honest!) but it just didn’t happen so I got up. Doesn’t seem like the best way to do an exam but it’s the happiest I’ve been with any of my exams so far, so maybe I’m on to something.
Only one exam to go. And then weeks of just hanging around with my uni friends. And then the whole summer off. I can’t wait!
Edit: I have been awake for thirty-something hours, or something. Since yesterday morning anyway – it’s 8pm now. “Go to bed”, my friends keep telling me, but it’s not that simple. I walk around, very quickly, clicking my fingers, thinking, thinking, thinking, laughing to myself. I sit down, tap my feet, talk with my hands, knock things over. I get into bed but I can’t lie still. I close my eyes but they fly open. I try to read, I can’t concentrate, my eyes skip around the page, I can’t focus, I can’t stop moving, can’t stop thinking, and whenever I start, I can’t stop talking, repeating words over and over again because I’m thinking and talking too fast to keep up with myself. I’m hoping I’ll just wear myself out. Hopefully some time in the next few hours – I have to be up and about to revise tomorrow. But I’m not tired, if anything I feel more awake than ever, more energetic…happier. A bit distractible and a bit strange but better by miles than what preceded it. I do kind of wish there was a middle ground, though.
Oh, okay.
Posted on: May 26, 2009
I’m fiiiiine.
Excellent!
Spent most of last night weeping to myself and writing suicide notes. Then, around about midnight, I decided to see if there was anyone around, just so I could sit in someone’s company (not that I’ve felt like doing that for days) and I got caught up in a hilarious conversation about totalitarianism (no, I didn’t think that was possible either).
Anyway, two hours later I was sat on my bed, jittery and excited for no discernable reason, waiting for the sun to rise so I could get on with my day.
I have two exams this week. That’s suddenly not so daunting a prospect.
News
Posted on: May 18, 2009
Announcement: yet more computer problems mean that I’m sporadically online at best. I’m writing this in an abandoned computer lab. So if I’m not around for a while, it’s because technology is conspiring against me.
A bit of an update -> Read the rest of this entry »
Drivel
Posted on: May 14, 2009
Recovering
Posted on: May 12, 2009
For the first time in a few days, I’m feeling kind of human. This is surely a step in the right direction.
I am, of course, prone to overreacting. I have not been at death’s door. I have had a cold. But in fairness to me, it was the kind of cold whose first victims are your sense of perspective and your ability to laugh at yourself. Two things which I am thankful have returned to me.
My friends have been their usual funny, caring, casual selves (Me: I feel better but I sound like an old man. My friend: Best of both worlds, then?). And I have been coughing and sneezing and croaking and complaining, which hasn’t been fun for any of us.
But, of course, feeling better, not needing to sneeze as much…it’s good, but it’s not a miracle. I can still feel like crap in another way.
I don’t think I’m depressed. I’m downhearted. I’m panicking. But that’s all. Read the rest of this entry »
Loopy, Lonely and Lost 
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