The five stages of finishing your exams

If you’re on the verge of finishing your exams, here is the recovery process you can expect…


1. Freedom

The examiner calls out “Pens down” and it’s all over – exam period has officially finished for another year. Months of stress, weeks of revision and hours of tears and tantrums have all led up to this. Summer is finally in sight and being made to wait to leave the exam hall row by row seems like some kind of ridiculous torture.

2. Panic

Once the exam invigilators/jailers have finally released their prisoners, a post-exam review is inevitable. It seemed to go pretty well at the time, but everyone else answered the second essay question in a completely different way and you are starting to panic. Wait, there were questions on the back of the paper?! Oh God. Oh God.

Never before have you been on such an emotional roller-coaster; such joy has become a crushing low in a matter of seconds. You’re not sure whether to cry or punch the guy boasting about how well the exam went. Maybe you’ll do both.

3. Recovery

After a teary call to your mum, it’s decided that the best option for the rest of the day is to catch up on all the stuff you have neglected for the last few weeks – namely, food and rest. After stocking up on an obscene amount of junk food on the way home, you take to your bed, ready to catch up on a month’s worth of Netflix viewing and to eat enough ice-cream to conceive not just one food baby, but twins.

4. Alcohol, Alcohol, Alcohol 

Whether it’s the carbs or the sleep, you wake up feeling a lot more positive. Maybe it went a lot better than you first thought? Maybe your whole future hasn’t been flushed down the drain? Maybe you aren’t going to have to live with your parents until you’re 38?

Either way, it’s time to get drunk. Whether it’s in the pub, a club or just in your own living room, you can pretty sure you won’t be alone in drinking to forget the last few weeks of exam-related hell.

5. Purging 

Once the initial post-exam whirlwind has passed and your celebration/commiseration hangover has worn off, you come to the realisation that no exams means no revision. No more mind maps. No more flashcards. No more endless hours sat in front of a computer screen.

You can finally get back to doing what students are famous for – a whole lot of nothing! Well, Jeremy Kyle isn’t going to watch itself, is it? To commerate the occasion, you decide to destroy the revision notes that have been your life for the last month and a half. Let’s just hope when it comes to resits in August, you won’t regret it…