Cramming: A Love Story

It’s Tuesday. Exams start on Monday. You, dear reader, are sitting in the library pretending to write lecture notes while actually scrolling TikTok, sipping a RedBull, and wondering whether your future hinges on how well you can remember the Krebs cycle. Spoiler: it does. At least until next week.

Welcome to Trinity’s favourite pre-exam tradition: cramming. It’s there for you when nothing else is. It’s chaotic. It’s caffeine-fuelled. It’s probably ruining your skin. And yet, every year, we return to it like moths to a very stressful flame.

The Ritual Begins

First, there’s the denial phase. This usually kicks off three weeks before exams, when someone in your tutorial whispers, “have you started revising yet?” and you laugh like it’s the most absurd idea you’ve ever heard. “Oh god, no,” you say, eyes twitching. “Plenty of time.” Lies.

Fast forward to now: you’re suddenly aware that you have five days to revise ten weeks’ worth of content across four modules. You do the maths, cry a bit, then open a Google Doc titled something inspiring like "ALL OF IT".

The Library Arc

The Ussher becomes your second home. You stake your claim with a water bottle, a laptop, and enough snacks to survive a minor apocalypse. You’ve brought your highlighters. You will not be using them. Instead, you spend the first hour scrolling through your phone, or doing the NYT Mini as a mental ‘warm-up’ to the day.

Eventually, the panic sets in. You pull out your notes, realise they make no sense, and end up on YouTube watching a video called ‘The Entire French Revolution Explained in 5 mins’. This is now your lecture’s replacement.

The Snack Spiral

No cramming experience is complete without a descent into nutritional madness. You start the week with homemade pasta and good intentions. By Thursday, you’re running on Tesco Meal Deals and an unholy amount of Monsters. Someone brings in biscuits. You eat half the packet. You forget what year it is.

Top tip: if your revision diet could be legally sold at a petrol station, it’s time to re-evaluate.

Productivity Theatre

One of the finest traditions of cramming is pretending to work. You open five tabs: ChatGPT, your course’s Blackboard page, a PDF titled ‘Reading List’, and two Google Docs you never update. Occasionally you switch between them to look busy. You consider making a mind map but spend an hour choosing the perfect font.

You tell your friends you’re "in the zone." You are not in the zone. You are on Instagram Reels watching a dog do taxes.

Group Study: A Greek Tragedy

Studying with friends sounds wholesome. It’s not. One of you actually knows the material and becomes the de facto tutor. Another insists on making an Anki you will never use. Someone starts stress-baking. You spend six hours and learn precisely nothing except that you might have ADHD.

Eventually, you all sit in silence, surrounded by notes, communicating only in sighs and increasingly aggressive pen clicks.

Sleep? Never Heard of It

Sleep becomes optional. You convince yourself that four hours is "fine" if you have coffee. You wake up at 3am in a cold sweat because you dreamed about your exam paper asking for a comprehensive analysis of something you've never heard of, like "postmodernism in Irish tax law."

You know it’s bad when you start Googling "can you die from revision." (Technically no. Mentally? Maybe.)

The Night Before

The final stage of cramming is pure existential dread. Your notes are illegible. Your memory is fried. You try to reread everything and end up hyper-fixating on one obscure theory you’re convinced will come up. It won’t.

You text your mates things like "WE'RE COOKED" and "DO YOU REMEMBER ANYTHING ABOUT MARX???" followed by a series of crying emojis. No one replies. They're spiralling too.

Eventually, you give up, whisper "it is what it is" into the void, and attempt sleep.

Exam Day: The Reckoning

You show up with three pens, none of which work. Your ID card photo looks like a mugshot. Someone’s crying in the bathrooms. Someone else is casually chatting about Kant like it’s a podcast topic. You contemplate a new life as a bartender in Prague.

Then the paper lands. You look at the first question. It actually makes sense. You write. You remember things. You almost enjoy yourself. It’s over before you know it.

You leave the exam hall in a daze. Outside, the sun is shining. You go to the Pav. You order a pint. Life, somehow, continues.

Final Thoughts (Because You Definitely Skimmed to the End)

Cramming is stupid. It’s stressful, inefficient, and objectively bad for you. It also kind of works, in a deranged sort of way. Not because it’s effective, but because it forces you to do something. And sometimes, something is enough.

So if you’re reading this instead of revising: fair. But then close this tab, put your phone on airplane mode, and get to work. Exams are hell, but they’re short-lived. You’ll get through it.

And next year, you’ll definitely start earlier.

(Nah jk, no you won’t)