Ask first-years: How was your first college midterms week experience? -

At last. At last we have made it to the end of midterms week.

As fall break begins, you can almost hear a collective "sigh" of relief hanging in the air across campus. For sophomores, juniors, and seniors, this time of year is now routine — you procrastinate, you stress for a few days, you take the tests, and it's over.

But for first-years, midterm season is a shocking (and probably traumatizing) event that will affect them for the rest of their test-taking lives. As they leave the glimmering fantasy world in which an A+ is easily attainable and enter the real world in which the goal is simply to pass, many younger students will find their worlds flipped upside down.

While studying takes over their lives in October, even the brightest-eyed first-years will slowly but surely develop the dark, sagging bags under their eyes that are the mark of a true college student. I, myself, have not gone to sleep before 3 a.m. in the past week, and have thus achieved the legal status of Vampire.

To gauge how hard these past two weeks have been on UNC's youngest, I asked some first-years about their first experiences with college midterms.

Were midterms as bad as you expected?

“No, not really. I was a little concerned about how much they counted percentage-wise for your grade, but in the end they didn’t turn out as bad as I thought they were going to be. For the most part people were always like, ‘[it’s] a huge deal’, and it didn’t really turn out to be as big of a deal as I thought it was.”

— Travis Schafer, business administration major

How did you try and prepare?

“Memorization was a lot [of studying], I used notecards. I studied a lot, but honestly I just thought [midterms] were kind of terrible. I’m a bad test taker, so I didn’t like them very much.”

— Thomas Douglas, undecided

Was there ever a moment when you thought you were going to crash?

“Right before my Stats midterm, I was really tired...I didn’t feel prepared, the night before I didn’t really do much, so rather than studying I kind of took a nap. And then I took the test and it went alright, so it was good!”

— Thomas Selzer, undecided

Where did you find was the best place to study?

“Either in the lounge in our dorm because most people who are in there are trying to study as well, or the library because, again, people in the library tend to be quiet, so it’s a good place to relax and study.”

— Kyle Bleiweis, undecided