It’s crunch time again at MHCC, and the textbooks you’ll find laying dormant, unused or neglected are most likely feeling the twitters and anxiety of finals boiling behind your foreheads. You may find yourself glaring at the books’ guilt-inducing bindings and ominous covers from outside the disheveled innards of backpacks. But zippers were invented for a reason – and now it’s time to use those hundreds of interlocking teeth for precisely half the reason they were invented: to be unzipped.

Heft your pricey books from their confines, open them as you would a door to a dream or wish that waits patiently in the beams of tomorrow, and remember that this will definitely not be the last series of tests you trudge through.

Life, like finals, is a test of how much you’ve gleaned, how much you’ve grown in the time you’ve been gifted. And, like life, finals can be very tough. It helps to be proactive, anticipating those barrages and gauntlets before they pop into view. And face it: you’ve had at least nine weeks to prep, to learn – to grow.

Test anxiety is only as prevalent as you allow it to be. Sure, if you’ve been shirking your studies all term, the stress might be a smidgen more likely, but it doesn’t have to be. Most people have fairly useable brains, even if their focus is on all the wrong or more entertaining things. Start cramming now.

Pack those lines of gobbledygook into your craniums and, even if the information isn’t permanently stored, at least you’ll feel the ever-personal satisfaction of knowing you got a better grade than you would have otherwise.

As you walk through the halls, past students that share the same tendencies to omit possibilities from their reality, know they are more like you than you think. Revel in these similarities by joining a study group. It may sound nerdy, but you’d be surprised what a different perspective can help to clarify. And remember, even if you don’t study for finals, it’s not like employers ask for your GPA when you show them you earned a degree – and you’ll earn that degree, won’t you?