On Thursday was my very last day of classes. Ever. One of the many lasts I will experience this year.

And for something that extraordinary, it really felt like any other day of classes. But the reality is that next semester I am not taking any classes. And it is my last semester of college. While I have not had any mandatory classes to take during the past couple of semesters, I always took some classes, because the more classes I have taken the better, right? And most of these classes were taken out of personal interest in the topic. But I have realized, especially this past semester, that going to class felt like a chore. As did the reading, even though they were good books. I dropped out of the two classes I took this past semester temporarily in December because I needed to focus on my thesis.

After Christmas I went back to my classes but I realized that if I am going to write my thesis all day I’d rather have my break from writing involve a fun TV show than more reading and discussion about literature. And because this upcoming semester is going to be all studying, I decided that I will use what little spare time I have to watch TV, read a fun book, or go to the gym. Taking classes always involves more work than I expect. I want to do all the reading, and that takes time, because if I don’t, I end up sitting in class not knowing what everyone is talking about, and I end up feeling like I am wasting my and the professor’s time.

So this upcoming semester? I will focus on the things that really matter and fill the rest of the time with distractions. I think that I will need to balance out all the studying with fun activities that distract me from the madness that these exams are going to be. Because otherwise? I think I just might lose my mind.

Over the course of the next five months, I will take two written exams of five hours each – each exam will consist of me answering one single question about an excerpt from one text. I have to prepare each of eight texts for one exam and ten to twelve for the other in detail. My first exam will be on April 10th, with the second following four weeks later. And because during the week, there is a shortage in rooms, we get to take these exams on a Saturday at 8am. (I don’t know which one is more awful.) After my written exams, I have two oral exams of an hour each following. I will have to prepare about the same amount of texts for that (though there will likely be some overlap). Each of the four exams will account for a sixth of my degree grade (with my thesis accounting for a third). The pressure is immense.

And because of the way my degree works? I can do amazingly, and I can completely fuck it up. It’s up to me. And because I want to do the best I can – I want to profit from the system and actually improve compared to the grades I got throughout the past few years, all of which do not account for anything now – I am meeting up with a study group regularly and I will make a study schedule. I will make studying my full-time job. And come July 12th (my deadline for taking all my exams, though I might be done a week or two earlier), I will take a deep breath, thank Heavens for having finished that very stressful last year of college, and do absolutely nothing for a week or two. And by nothing, I mean nothing productive. I am planning to do lots of friends-meeting, chick-lit-reading, bad-TV-watching. And I will enjoy my last summer in this town. My last seven weeks in the town that I called home since 2002.