The Impact of Finals Week

Imagine that feeling when you check your final grade after studying for hours only to see a number way lower than you wanted. Your stomach drops. Everything feels wrong and you can’t help but be utterly disappointed in yourself. When you feel like you’ve let yourself down, how do you get back up? 

As much as it may feel like it, academics are not everything. Of course we all want good grades, but it is hard to come to terms with a score that makes you doubt yourself. Let’s first talk about why this is the way it is, because as we all know, there’s more at hand. Finals deeply impact mental health and well being. 

The stress of finals week is more than just pressure to perform well. It feels like a do-or-die situation sometimes. When you tie your entire self-worth, future, and self-perception to school success, of course a low score will feel terrible. A way to combat this is expanding your horizons. If you place all your eggs into the basket of grades, a bad grade can make it feel like you have nothing else, but that’s not true. When you take into account all the other aspects of you and your life, such as your hobbies, extracurriculars, who you are as a person, you realize you are still strong in other ways. For example, if you got a bad score in Chemistry but you love playing the piano in your free time, remind yourself of that! Keep an open-minded, objective view of yourself and try to remember the other things you have to offer.

When it's finals week and you have so much to study for, it often results in sacrificing important things to stay afloat academically. Many students across the board lose hours of sleep to study, miss out on family time, and more. This is accompanied with headaches, tiredness, anxiety, difficulty focusing, which makes things even harder.  In the future, make sure you are still keeping time to be with your loved ones, take care of yourself, and never miss out on sleep. Keeping yourself in a healthy, happy state affects your performance just as much as studying does. Putting too much pressure on yourself is actually not productive, as it leads to burnout and stress. Instead, balance your studies with quick breaks, downtime, enough sleep, and don’t be scared to ask for help from teachers and more. Avoid comparing yourself to others who may have performed better than you, you aren’t aware of the crucial things they sacrificed like time with family or good mental health. It’s always you vs. you! If you did better than you did last time, that’s something to truly be proud of. And if not, it’s totally okay. You can always do better next time. 

However, if you didn’t get the scores you wanted this finals season, just remember that it doesn’t reflect who you are as a person wholly. When you look at the big picture of life, finals are only one small aspect. A number in a gradebook could never encapsulate your personality, your uniqueness, and who you really are.

Art by Aarushi S