I spent the hour before the final exam of my undergraduate degree shovelling fairy floss into my mouth over pages and pages of notes only intelligible to people who were also eating fairy floss and severely sleep deprived. It was a fitting end to what had been a longstanding ritual of desperation, disorganisation and sugar.

And somehow, it worked.

Now as we rocket towards the end of May, exams are once again just around the corner. More to the point, they’re lurking behind that corner, waiting to mug us of our sanity and our sleep like some terrible ethnic minority stereotype in an episode of Law and Order.

But in the black depths of end-of-semester despair, we also tend to learn a lot about ourselves and the people we’ve been sharing notes with all year. And the way we spend those final, fleeting hours before an exam can be the most telling of all.

So this June, where will we find you?

Desperately cramming

You’re reading notes tucked inside a book of Bukowski poems because you don’t want people to know you’re still studying, but really you haven’t slept since the budget was announced and you’ve started to have mild hallucinations about exam room doors vanishing into walls faster than the Room of Requirement. You and the librarian now have a loose flirtation, but you’re not ready to commit yourself just yet. You’ve got this!

Playing Quizmaster

You’ve made best friends with Quizlet over the break and now you can’t stop thinking in multiple choice. You scoff as your classmates over depend on option C. It’s never C anymore. The world’s moved on, you think, and so have your friends – literally. They just got up and left.

Acting out one of your dentist’s recurring nightmares

On entering the exam you’re stopped for a suspicious white powder ringing your mouth, which, on further investigation, turns out to be Wizz Fizz. You, my fellow sugar fiend, have a problem. And if you’re anything like me, it might just get you over the line.

Since we were children, sugar and caffeine have been our recipe for success, and there’s no reason (apart from Type 2 diabetes) that should end today. Ignore the shaking and the pounding heart-rate – that’s just your brain’s way of telling you it’s full to the brim with useful facts waiting to come out. Or you’re about to slide into some kind of food coma. You’ll take your chances.

Reciting a Christopher Walken monologue to yourself in the mirror

“It’s too late to be scared, it’s time to kill!” says Walken to a guy at a sink and a rather indifferent men’s bathroom in Poolhall Junkies. And he’s right.

Whether you’re actually a “lion” or not, you still factor an extra half hour into your own bathroom break every semester. You look yourself in the eye, and for the first time you don’t see a frightened undergraduate with eyes red and a heaving stomach. You see the finger-calloused warrior that 72 hours of study has forged you into. Side note: painstakingly gelling up the signature Walken hairdo probably isn’t worth the realism, though.

Planning your foolproof cheat strategy

You also spent the hour in the bathroom, but only so you can convincingly ink notes inside your arm tattoo. Hopefully the examiner will believe you really did get drunk on Schoolies and have “I heart the former president of Nigeria, Goodluck Jonathan” tattooed on your wrist.

Drinking away your sense of shame and impending doom

Forget TV monologues and textbooks – you’ll take your pre-exam study with a side of whisky, thank you very much. And hold the study. Nursing your “usual” in that favourite little corner of the campus bar, it suddenly occurs to you where you’ve been spending all your time this semester. Shit.

Sleeping in

The one morning your cat doesn’t climb on your face at 5.30am to wake you up, and you have an exam on (you knew she was plotting against you). That last hour before your exam now runs like the opening of a Daniel Craig Bond film – the good one with the leaping and the cement mixers. Godspeed, son.

Giggling maniacally to yourself

With next to no preparation, a terrible track record of cramming, and a stubborn yet dignified adherence to your health regime, you’ve long resigned yourself to your fate. Panic has now given way to a manic kind of euphoria and you float around outside the exam room, laughing hysterically every time someone mentions an unrecognisable name from the readings. It’s OK, buddy. It’s almost over.

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Sherryn Groch is studying journalism at RMIT University. She enjoys writing short stories, frolicking in unsecured meadows and sometimes tweets at @Sherryn_G.

(Lead image: Jane Rahman, Flickr Creative Commons license)