Every family has that one crazy relative—in my family, it’s my Uncle Steve. He used to ride a unicycle to work, he celebrates “1,000 days” instead of birthdays and he reuses calendars year after year (he owns exactly 14, one for each possible calendar configuration: Jan. 1 on each of the seven days of the week, leap year and non-leap year editions).
But as a kid, my favorite quirk of my uncle’s was his talent for juggling. Keeping three things afloat with only two hands? It’s a hypnotizing party trick for young and old.
Here comes the smooth transition into something topical and relevant—by this point in the semester, you can probably smell these segues coming.
We have reached the final week of the semester. Exams, papers and projects—not to mention packing to go home and preparing for the winter holiday of your preference—all loom over your head, and the schedule and routine you have come to rely on all semester is now simply a clue in decoding the exam schedule. Yes, this is the week when every Duke student becomes a juggler.
Juggling the Duke end-of-semester workload and actual juggling share a difficult learning curve. My uncle started trying to teach my twin brother and me to juggle in third grade. My brother (who appears destined to be my kids’ crazy uncle) took to juggling immediately. It took me until my freshman year of high school, more than six years later, to finally put the pieces together and learn to juggle.
Juggling isn’t something you can learn from a book (although for those looking for a book on the subject, I would recommend adding “Juggling for the Complete Klutz” to your holiday wishlist). You learn by doing—and by failing. You’ll drop a lot of bean bags before everything finally clicks and you get the motion down.
Exam week juggling should not be so daunting. And although experience helps, I think that juggling your assignments during exam week is something that you can improve through reading (this column). I don’t have all the answers, but I can milk this analogy for at least three bullet-points worth of senior wisdom. Here are some ways you can avoid drops as you bring your semester to a close:
Prepare. Before you start throwing balls in the air and hope to catch them, you need to make a few preparations, like making sure there are no sharp or breakable objects around and putting the bean bags in your hands the way you practiced.
Similarly, your exam week experience will be much smoother if you start with a clean slate. List or diagram out your exam times, due dates, study group meetings and the like in whatever format you prefer—be it Google calendar or a giant whiteboard on your wall—so that you can know at a glance what you’re up against this week. You could also clean your room and your desk and organize your study space, giving yourself a fresh start for exam week, but these projects could also be highly successful procrastination techniques later in the week.
→Keep your focus on what’s in front of you. Little-known fact about juggling: most of the time, only one ball is actually in the air. The others, resting in your hands, are in your peripheral vision, but your focus is on the one in the air.
Exam week is the same way. Of all the assignments you may have over the next week, you can only focus well on one at a time. Stay aware of the other projects, but target your efforts and give each of your projects your undivided attention in spurts to do your best work. And if your focus is on what’s in front of you, it can’t be on the things that are behind you—like the exams and papers you’ve already finished and handed in. Those are out of your hands and into the hands of your professor—your wise, merciful, dashingly handsome/stunningly beautiful professor you so deeply respect and admire. Your time is better spent studying for the exams still to come than obsessing over the ones you’ve already completed.
Most importantly, don’t freak out. There’s a lot of work, but don’t let yourself get overwhelmed. It’s when you start panicking that the balls start to drop to the floor. You know how to do your work; you’re smart and you’re prepared and you’re going to do fine. Treat yourself to occasional study breaks doing something you enjoy. Think about it this way—aren’t you too busy to be stressed? You can worry about things once you’re on winter break, but right now you have too much work to waste time worrying about how much work you have.
There’s a light at the end of the tunnel—winter break, New Year’s, ACC basketball season and, if you really turn forward your calendars, next year’s World Juggling Day is June 19. Best of luck on making it through all your exams.
Bradford Colbert is a Trinity senior. This is his final column of the semester.
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