January 18, 2018, by Jack

How to survive a 9AM exam

It’s a crushing feeling, isn’t it? You get an email telling you your exam timetable has been released. You open up the portal hoping that the algorithmic gods have smiled upon you and scheduled your exams at times a person might reasonably expect you to be awake… Nope, you have X amount of 9AMs. You haven’t been awake, never mind fully functioning at 9AM since you were sixteen. What do you do?

1. Sleep

Yeah, I know: sounds good, doesn’t work, never going to happen. But really, get some sleep. In fact, if you’re not reading this the day before your 9AM exam, start practising. Sorting out your sleep pattern is going to make this whole thing a lot easier. I know you’re thinking you’re going to need to stay up late skim reading the slides for those lectures you didn’t go to, but is it really going to make a difference at that point? Might as well sleep and be able to write coherently about the stuff you do know, rather than be half asleep and still not remember what the difference between science-stuff and other science-stuff is, if you ask me.

2. Alarms

Yes, that is intentionally plural, because you’re going to need a lot of them. If you’ve never seen an alarm set up that looks like this, welcome to the land of enlightenment, where none of us have quite figured out how to adult yet, so we just do stuff like this.

Better yet, there’s an alarm app called alarm “alarmy” where you set your alarm as usual, except to turn it off, you have to complete a task. That could be taking a picture of your toothbrush or scanning the barcode on your cereal box. Suffice to say, it’s really really annoying, but it works.

3. Light

Okay, so this is a weird one, but it’s scientifically proven that light, particularly sunlight, wakes you up in the morning. So, pull open those curtains and get yourself a face-full of rays. Unfortunately, this can be hard in January if it’s still dark outside, in which case the light will have to do. Yep, turn the light on. I know it hurts.

4. Coffee

Need I say more? Drink coffee in the morning, as much as you can stomach. Make it the first thing you do in your pre-exam routine. What’s that? You don’t like coffee? Shut up you heathen. Drink some coffee.

So yeah, that’s it. If you’re still here, good luck. You can do it. Confidence is everything, so fake it ‘till you make it.

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