Celebrating The End Of Midterms
October can mean many things: Autumn, Halloween, pumpkin pie, falling leaves. But for us college students, it means only one thing: Midterms.
This is the month when our over-worked minds are bombarded with papers and exams to test our knowledge gained thus far in the year. By this time some classes have even gone through two or three midterms. But now, as October comes to a close, so too does the dreaded, the painful, Midterm Season.
Now is a time for celebration, for smiling because you made it through one more of these difficult processes. So how do you plan to reward yourself? Here are some things you may have been drooling over these past weeks, that it is finally time to indulge on.
SLEEP
In case the capital letters weren’t enough, let me just repeat that one: Sleep.
Finally, after staying at the library until closing every night and pulling all-nighters until you could barely stand up straight, sleep is here. You get to curl up in bed, that lovely, warm bundle of comfy blankets and pillows that you have surely been neglecting while sitting at your desk for hours on end these past weeks.
Sleep the whole night away, the whole day even. Midterms are done and you have hours and hours of dreaming to catch up on.
Home Cooking
After weeks, maybe even months of rushing through meals, making ramen instead of real pasta because it’s faster, you have time to cook! How glorious! Think of all the recipes you’ve wanted to try out in your new apartment: pesto chicken, baked macaroni and cheese, caramel-fudge brownies.
Now here’s your time to whip out those cooking skills and actually enjoy your meals.
Make yourself something yummy and sit down to eat with good friends and nowhere else to be.
Return To The Outdoors
While midterms governed our lives, we have been holed up in the library for weeks on end, feeling like our lives are restricted to classrooms, lecture halls, and study spaces. Now, the world is ours. We can go outside, have picnics, take hikes, bask in the sunshine that is so wonderfully different than those fluorescent library lights.
The stresses of school can sometimes overwhelm us to the point we forget (or don’t have time) to take notice of where we are: our campus, our city, the changing seasons. Now that midterms are over, we can all take a breath and widen our gaze to see more than the books in front of us.
Call up your friends who you told once upon a time you would visit in their new apartment, or go to a water polo game with, and tell them you’re finally free! College is a time you should be able to explore the city you live in, attend spontaneous events, make new friends, and do fun things with them. Midterms kind of put a damper on these activities (what can we expect though, we are going to school) but now that these exams are over, go enjoy yourself!
Catch Up On Your Netflix Binging
If you haven’t been on Netflix in weeks (or if you’ve been slyly watching episodes between study sessions at the library), here is your opportunity to settle into that comfy bed of yours and do nothing but watch TV for as long as you please. Surround yourself with pillows and snacks, and immerse yourself in the dramatized fiction of your favorite show.
After all the work you have done this semester, you deserve a day of pajamas and Netflix and laziness to let yourself unwind.
Time To Dig Into A Novel
For all of you who have been putting off the novels on your personal book list to make way for required readings, it’s time to return to your bookshelf and pick out something just for you. After weeks of studying academic articles and technical documents, reward yourself. You have total freedom to choose whichever book you’d like, by any author you choose.
However you choose to celebrate the end of midterms, make it happy and relaxing enough to revitalize you. The end of midterm exams means that finals are just around the corner, where you will again be swept up in the current of studying, writing, and analyzing in libraries across campus. So let this celebration be one to give your mind and body the strength to push through those last exams in the coming months.