Everyone wants a midterm survival guide and believe it or not, there's no secret. It's all time management skills folks. (P.S. so is life.) But, if you are struggling, here are 5 tips to help you out:
1. DO NOT wait until Wednesday at 10pm to start writing your 5 page paper in Italian. You will not finish it. And if you do, it won't be very good. Start early, finish early. You'll be amazed at how many errors you made when you revisit a paper.
2. DO NOT email your professor at 2am expecting to get an answer before your 8am midterm the following day. They will not get that email until 7am the next morning and will probably not answer it. Even if they do, you'll probably be running late and not have time to check your email before the exam. If it were me, I'd just laugh and delete it. Mean? Yes. But there's no magic answer you're going to get from me 60 minutes before a test that is going to seriously influence your grade. You're either ready or you're not.....my email will not change that.
3. When professors ask you for a list of sources or a topic or an outline ahead of time, spend some time thinking about that topic. If you follow their timeline, you'll have plenty of time to get everything done. Professors set deadlines that seem "early" to help you develop your time management skills. We can tell you a thousand times to start your paper early but you won't. So, we just make you do it.....stick with us folks, we sort of know what we're doing.
4. All nighters do not equal good grades. Perhaps you are pulling that all nighter to study for biology....or perhaps you slept through the lecture on sleep, but staying up all night isn't healthy and you really just can't retain good information at 4am. You'd be much better off studying efficiently and sleeping than staying up and trying to cram the information of 25 lectures into you head. It's called cramming for a reason, you only retain it for about an hour and then it's gone. If you're cramming for a class you need for your major, you seriously need to reevaluate your major.
5. We're on your side. There are always extenuating circumstances and learning disabilities and emergencies. If you talk to us early we're MUCH more likely to make some kind of alternate arrangement with you. If you wait until the day your 15 page paper is due to tell me that you broke your index fingers on both hands ten days ago......I'm going to tell you that I'm sorry and that I hope you've learned to type with your other 8. If you'd come talk to me ten days ago, maybe we could have made some agreement that would have worked for both parties.
So, the secret is time management. Act early. You should feel good about visiting your professors' offices.....I sit in min pretty much all day every day. I love interruptions! Hence why my door is literally always open. Come visit me and tell me your story and I will either give you a pep talk (which is usually all you need) or we'll work together to get to some arrangement. If you're reading this and you haven't finished your paper for tomorrow, shame on you.
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