Midterm week

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Your palms are sweaty. Knees weak, arms are heavy. There’s vomit on your sweater already. No, this is not your debut into the Detroit rap scene; this is your first college midterm. It is 3 a.m. the morning of your midterm, and after 5 straight hours of seemingly staring at the same sentence of a textbook, you decide to accept your fate and try to sleep. Many of us had the ability in high school to glide through our courses with relative ease, studying little for tests and achieving straight A’s in every class—welcome to the world where everyone else did the same.

In our brief experience at Duke University thus far, we have encountered a very different world. No longer can we rely solely on information gleaned subconsciously when sleeping through a class; now we must pay attention, complete homework, and—for the first time for many of us—actually review material during the course instead of simply the hour preceding a test. This

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experience broadens our horizons, teaches us new skills, and gives us that indescribable joy of the first C of our lives.

For those of you who slept through President Brodhead's speech during convocation, he said something along the lines of “you’ll probably fail, and it’s ok.” We personally have already experienced the bitter truth of that statement. Our advice to those who have yet to experience a Duke exam: keep up with your work throughout the semester, avoid cramming the night before and definitely know when your midterms are. Remember, it’s only the first half of the first semester of the first year of college.

-Chris and Taylor