Exquisite terror of exams fades but end still seems far away

EXAM DIARY:MIND THE gap. My exam focus is now so finely honed that unplanned pregnant pauses are unacceptable, dangerous even.

Had I known that the pauses on the French listening paper would be so very long, I would have brought my biology notes in with me. Gaps are fine, necessary even – they give you time to look over what you’ve done and read what’s to come – but these prolonged pauses only served to distract me from what was going on.

Halfway through a particularly long one I found myself not thinking about Christophe’s issues with his sister but whether penguins find each other as amusing as we find them.

The paper was in a sense a welcome relief from the ones that had come before it. It’s hard to panic about a language. You can’t know it all, so you don’t worry about the gaps. There they are again. Tread carefully.

After the aural we filtered back to our bags and piles of notes that would no longer be needed. We’re becoming institutionalised now. The exquisite terror of the exams has faded, but the end still seems so far away. It’s become a grim march through the papers, dispatching one pile of notes and facing into another, night after exhausting night.

I was facing an evening of biology study, while others had the misfortune of an impending history exam. Some people didn’t have another exam for days – yet all the excitement got to someone and he turned to the group exclaiming: “I don’t have anything until Monday – so how am I supposed to feel now?”

It doesn’t help to stop and think. Not for the void between one French question and the next, and definitely not for the chasm of a long weekend.

It won’t be safe to let the mind wander again until the ultimate gap when these exams are over, and that’s more of a wide blue yonder.

Carin Hunt is a student at Wesley College, Dublin