Strong men tremble when they hear it / They’ve got cause enough to fear
it!
- Bill Sikes, My Name, Oliver!
Finals. I had heard enough about
them in the three years before I had to do them, and seen people crumbling
under the pressure they brought. I took comfort in the fact that I could do
three-quarters of my degree without having to engage with them. I waived them at
every opportunity between 2013 and October 2016. And then finals came knocking
at my doorstep.
And Ruth Akinradewo turned into a
different person.
Never have I ever experienced so
much pressure and stress, and I have promised to NEVER again do that to myself.
For my sake as well as the sake of the people around me who know and love me.
I’ve poked fun at it, but honestly,
stress in Oxford is not a joke. And finals – the final examinations in which
all the skills and knowledge you’ve accumulated in the years of your degree to
date are really put to the test – take that stress level to an all-time high.
I got to repeating a mantra to
myself in my final year as the pressure in the pressure-cooker got to an
unbearable degree: Oxford, you did not
bring me into this world and you will not take me out.
I posted it as a Facebook status
on a day I was particularly feeling the pressure, and I think it made a lot of
people laugh – and honestly when I had come up with that declaration it had
been in part jest, but as things got more and more intense it really became less
and less of a joke and a real, simple way of talking sense into myself when I
felt like I was losing my senses.
I’m a Christian and so I believe
that Jesus has the answer to all of my struggles and in Him lies the solution
to allay all my fears. Yet I knew that I was going to need to be reminded of
this a LOT more than usual to get through finals in one piece. Consequently, I
had posters all over my wall with some of the key verses to remind me of God’s peace.
And I STILL fell apart.
It seemed ridiculous, really. So
many times I had to talk to myself and say, “Ruth,
look, you’ve been through this and this and this,
are you really going to let Oxford break you?” No matter how hard it could
be, Oxford did not give me life and so it wasn’t going to take it from me. My
life wasn’t going to fall apart because of Oxford. It really wasn’t that deep.
That’s what the theory was. In
practice, it was pretty hard to exercise calmness and faith and all that good
stuff.
I had fourteen exams. Fourteen.
Four in the first week of final
term, and ten more over a two-week period in the fifth and sixth week of term.
On top of that, in the previous term I submitted two near-8,000 word
dissertation-like projects – on the same day. It’s not hard to see why the
pressure got to me and got the better
of me.
You speak to any Oxford graduate
about finals and they will tell you they were intense.
Pressure and stress took
different forms for different people. In my case, it made me withdrawn, pretty
low, indecisive, anxious, an insomniac, unable to see the bigger picture,
work-obsessed. I use the expression “I nearly killed myself” in more than one
sense.
As someone that is usually
upbeat, cheerful and a laughoholic, this version of myself couldn’t really be
more different to my real self. For some time I hid myself away because I felt
like I was supposed to have it all together. As the Christian, wasn’t I
supposed to be showing everyone else how to do finals whilst balancing green
tea on my head, living in a haze of peaceful serenity whilst everyone else was
tearing their hair out? (I may do a post about struggling with depression as a
Christian another time.)
I don’t think the stress of
finals being the straw that broke the camel’s back was about me not being
Christian enough. I think it revealed the tension at play between being human
and doing Oxford finals.
This just wasn’t normal. I was
someone who had gone through 10 GCSEs, 4 A-Levels and the AQA Baccalaureate,
and numerous music and drama exams. I had done Prelims in my first year as
well. Coping with exam stress and pressure wasn’t new to me. But I had never
reacted like this.
After handing in my two big
projects, I took one day off and then threw myself into revision for my finals.
I was two weeks into the Easter break but I decided to stay in Oxford to revise
to optimum level.
 |
| Those 2 big projects - done! |
The first two weeks went really
well. I enjoyed re-reading the books I’d enjoyed in my second year, getting to
read them without the thought of having to write an essay on them imminently.
There were too many books! How was I going to get through all of these works of literature in the six weeks I had left? And know the quotes by heart, the themes at the flick of a light switch? And Dante, DANTE...
Dante = Italy’s answer to Shakespeare.
My my, another reason doing
Italian added to my struggles.
Dante Alighieri, frankly a
brilliant poet, should rightly be studied, I’m not disputing that. His Divina Commedia (Divine Comedy) is an
awe-inspiring work made up of three volumes: Hell, Purgatory and Heaven, documenting
his vision of realms of the afterlife.
But do I regret that we had to
study three 700-page volumes of medieval Italian? Yes. Yes, yes, and yes. When
I picked the module that celebrated the greatest of Italy’s writers, I thought
about how I would be studying some of the most influential literature in
Europe, and at that, literature that celebrated God and Heaven. Plus to be
honest, it was clear that all the Italian tutors wanted you to pick it.
Did I think about how I was going
to have to revise all of it? No. Did
I think about how I was going to have to translate medieval Italian in my exam?
No. Did I think about how I was going to have to learn line-by-line verses of
ancient Italian? No.
My mum thinks it was Dante that
really submerged me in panic. Maybe so: there’s no doubt that having three
volumes of 700+ page works in medieval Italian was not exactly a recipe for
tranquillity.
BUT… There are people that never
had to read Dante that can relate to my experience of anxiety.
After two weeks of my revision
going well, I became unable to sleep. It’s true that I have struggled with
sleep disturbance in the past, but this was quite different. Night after night,
I would get no more than 2 hours’ sleep – not because I had gone to bed at 4am,
but because I was lying in bed consumed by stress about work and exams and my
mind simply would not go to sleep.
The sleeplessness was probably
the biggest battle during finals. I was already waking up at 6:30 to start work
latest by 8am, and ending my working day at 10pm. I was working all day. To be
honest, I quite relished the idea of sleep as a way to get away from the
constant slog of work. And now even that was being taken away from me?
And of course, when you don’t
sleep well, you don’t work well. I found myself falling asleep at my desk
during the day because I was tired. Then I would feel I had to do more work
because falling asleep wasn’t factored into my schedule!
I more
or less stopped having fun because of my finals. I stepped back a little from
choir, I stopped going to my church’s weekly student nights and just went to
church on Sundays, I completely stopped athletics in my final year… I’m not
saying that it wasn’t sensible to scale back some of my activities to give
myself more time to revise, and make sure I wasn’t spreading myself thinly
between too much but rather giving more to what I could manage at a particular
time, but the sense of wanting to do well meant I really couldn’t see further
than my finals. My wellbeing was suffering.
The
irony is, all the wanting to do well and worrying about not doing well enough,
was stopping me from doing well! Worry and anxiety of this nature consumes you
and actually massively destabilises and even paralyses you. As a result, I
would sit in the library from 8-10am staring at my books and my notes and not
making any sense of them, or barely writing three sentences on my spreadsheet.
The
change in me was so apparent to my mum, my friends, my pastors and my tutors
that they stepped in in full force to do whatever they could to help. I really
couldn’t have gotten through it without them. I got on my own nerves with the
state I was in, so I don’t know how they managed to deal with me as kindly and
understandingly as they did.
I wasn’t planning to go home
until Easter weekend, but my mum got me to come home THREE times in the week
before then because I really needed some help. I was being so irrational. I
remember when I got home, saying to my mum and one of my friends over and over
again, “I’m gonna fail. I’m gonna fail.” The reality is, that was completely
untrue – despite how badly my revision was going, my results in mock exams a
couple of weeks later were still far from
fails.
My experience is not that
different to a lot of finalists.
We all knew how awful finals were
and mutual support and encouragement came through then like no other time.
Every time you met a fellow finalist, you would boost each other by saying:
“You can do it, I believe in you! We can
do this!” (Because of course you had to encourage yourself as well.) One of
my friends and I, having a particularly rough day in the library, joked that we
could make a mixtape of the amount of times we’d sighed! Every time the other
sighed and put her head on the table in total despair, the other would say “Are
you OK?” and then after lamenting together for a few minutes, we’d pick up our
pens and start working again. You saw the best of humanity and people coming
together during finals, honestly. We were all carrying the horrible burden
together.
Angst, irritability, depression,
indecisiveness, frustration, panic… I mean, it was different for each person
but generally finals weren’t the happiest times of our lives.
 |
| See how happy I was post-exams??! |
Oxford finals can actually get so
unbearable that year in, year out, a large number of people decide to rusticate. Actually, this doesn’t just
happen before finals, but can happen at any point during one’s degree.
Rustication is when a student takes a year out of their degree for health
reasons. It can be because of physical health, but more and more frequently now
it is linked to mental health. I heard twelve lawyers in my final year
rusticated in the two weeks before their nine exams, because it was just
getting to be too much.
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