Penn Editorial 9.27.11

It's almost midterm season. The seniors are thinking about grad schools, the GRE and the fact that they're graduating in about five minutes (five minutes here meaning eight months). The juniors are thinking about internships. The sophomores are thinking about resume-builders. The freshmen, well, they're still wearing their keys on lanyards.

As a campus, we are moving from the cheerful dipping-our-feet-into-the-ocean-of-academia of the first few weeks and into the part of the semester where we subsist on coffee and spite. Classes are getting harder. Professors are getting less lenient. All-nighter season, what-is-it-with-this-weather season, burning the iPad at both ends season have begun.

If it hasn't started getting overwhelming, give it more time.

And sometimes it might seem more or less hopeless. Because after you finish your take-home exam for math, you have to really hit that history paper hard. And after that is the literature presentation, which you should have been working on even before you finished the history paper. On top of that is the reading that we know you're going to do, the frantic flipping through notes so you don't sound like an absolute nincompoop if you're called on, and the short papers and quizzes that'll crop up in the middle of all that. Final 
papers and exams lurk beyond that, and after the reprieve of winter break - if you're not taking a winter term course online - it starts again, except with sleet.

Stressors are going to throw themselves at you with the repetition and moaning inevitability of zombies at a fortified house.

We at The Penn, partly in the hopes that we will take our own advice, are giving you this preemptive advice: relax.

There's a lot to deal with right now, and there's more coming. And as soon as you finish one thing, you have to move onto the next. It's almost like tightrope walking, if you had to jump from wire to wire and dodge flying piranhas and the Angry Birds that you're playing with instead of working on that history paper.

No matter how much time you're sure you don't have, you have time to sit down and breathe, take a quick nap, have a cup of tea, if cups of tea are your cup of tea. Do that. Things will look better after you have.