There is one thing lurking between me and being able to go home and go on break: finals.

Finals have always been a source of stress for me, the difference now is that the stakes are higher.

College is where you come to learn skills that you will need in order to make yourself employable.

This means that you have to pay attention to what you are doing.

In high school, if you slacked off you could fall behind.

It being high school however, the teachers were always there to help you get back on track, and were overall pretty forgiving about work.

If you slack off in college, you are really hurting yourself.

Not only will you fall behind, but your professor will not hold your hand and make sure that you learn everything.

If you fail a final not only are you hurting your future self, but you spent a full semester taking a class that you will probably have to take again.

As finals crawl ever closer, each professor is cramming everything they did not finish into a small period of time.

This means more homework, projects, presentations and essays that are all due at the point in the semester that is deemed the most stressful.

In some cases, these projects count as the final.

For some classes, once you have made it through all that work you are left with a long and very important test to take.

I always feel like I needed to do more studying.

This feeling stems from the fact that in the past even the exams I studied the most for, there always seemed to be questions I didn’t know and didn’t study for.

Overall, finals stress me out but at the end of the day it can only be a maximum five days.

I think working under stress is good for people because it makes you understand yourself better.

And once you make it through the stress (of finals at least), you are free to relax and enjoy yourself.