Overcoming Nervousness About Final Exams at College

In my last year of college I found myself thinking back to how I had first gotten in. The application and admissions process had worn me down, and it was a tougher thing to navigate than it seems to be now. Colleges were not everywhere the way they are today, so getting accepted meant long hours in high school and loading up on advanced classes just to stay in the running. By the time senior year arrived I was proud to have come that far, but the pace never let up. A capstone project sat in front of me, and finals loomed right behind it.

That exam stretch turned into one of the most frightening periods I can remember. Fear and anxiety followed me through every part of it: the studying, the tests themselves, and worst of all the empty days afterward when none of us knew yet how we had done.

Sitting in that overwhelm, I came to a small realization. The way out of my own dread about the future might be to help the people around me manage theirs. We were all waiting together, so I decided to be brave about it. I asked several friends for their examination index numbers so I could look up their results and bring the news back to them gently, with whatever optimism I could offer.

Climbing to the fifth floor of our department, I felt the anxiety build with every step. Somewhere on those stairs I made up my mind that I would not look at my own result until everyone else had left. The scene upstairs was a jumble of reactions. A few students were grinning and holding onto each other; others had gone quiet and pulled inward. Passing meant a real future in those days, a decent job waiting on the other side. Failing meant going back home with nothing to show for years of effort.

I checked my friends' numbers, went back down, and watched them head home smiling. Then I told them to go on without me. I wanted to stay.

I sat outside the department without yet knowing my own score, and my mind wandered. College had been a genuinely good time. It was where I met the friends who pulled me out of the loneliness I had carried as an only child, and I did not want to let those bonds slip away. Thinking about them pulled me right back to the thing I was avoiding: I still had not seen my result. My future was a blank. What would I say to my parents if I had failed? Would the friendships survive it? Would everything ahead of me fall apart?

Graduation was getting close for those who had passed. Everyone else seemed to know their next step. I kept sitting out there, turning over what the result would mean for me, with that fluttering, hollow feeling in my stomach.

No matter the outcome, the future itself had me worried. But at some point I decided that a grade on an exam was not going to run my life. The thing to do was meet it with some courage. So I thought through what I would actually do if I had failed, and I laid out clear plans in my head on the spot. Whatever came, I would take it with confidence and some dignity. Self-pity and hopelessness were not going to fix a single thing. I knew, at a minimum, that I had worked hard all the way through, and I could accept the result with honesty. I would get past whatever obstacles showed up. Nothing was going to keep me from the life I wanted. Not even a failing grade.

After that I went up the stairs with a kind of charged determination, ready for either answer. All that thinking and bracing had left me feeling strong, and when I finally saw the result I was steady. I had passed my final exams.

I wanted to sprint to my friends and shout about it, but my legs were shaking so hard with excitement that I could barely walk. The weekend that followed was the best stretch of my whole time at university. We threw a farewell party at a church hall nearby, sang our last hymns, and took turns stepping up to say something to the group. People loved every speech, and each of us got a round of applause.

You can picture what it meant to go home and tell my parents, my relatives, and the neighbors that I had finished a full university education, which back then came with the near-certainty of a good job and a good salary. The neighborhood put together a celebration to send me into whatever came next.

The anxiety and the low feelings were temporary, built entirely out of fearful thoughts about a future that had not happened. The real danger had never been there at all. It taught me something plain about the gap between what we manufacture in our heads and what is actually in front of us. Change the attitude and the whole thing changes with it.