Activities to occupy your time with the week before your final

By Ava Zardynezhad, December 12 2022—

By much-unexpected misfortune, you find yourself with no more than a week left until an important final. Utterly unprepared to face the future, here are a few activities you can occupy your time with in the meantime. 

Bake a cheesecake 

For a student to achieve academic success, they must be well-nourished — it is known. So, you decide to learn how to bake a cheesecake for the first time. But, much like studying for an exam, you never study a recipe too closely until minutes before you start baking. You realize you’re missing half of the ingredients that you need, but you’re committed to this course of action now and there’s no way you can study on an empty stomach, so out to the store you go — for the third time today. 

Harness-train your cat 

They say taking a mental health walk goes a long way, even if you do it for just five minutes. Being the considerate human that you are, you can’t just leave your poor cat at home alone and unstimulated for that long. So, you decide to harness-train your cat and take her for her first walk outside, all in a day’s work. After a pack of treats, scratch marks that might need medical attention and a harness that’s seen so much evil, it no longer resembles its old self, you decide your cat is definitely more of an indoor cat. 

Go to IKEA

Ergonomics is everything when it comes to studying. You can’t be expected to study for over eight hours a day on an uncomfortable chair, can you? To remedy that, you head over to everyone’s favourite urban amusement park, IKEA. Obviously, you can’t pick a chair before trying every single one in the showroom. You also won’t have enough strength to assemble it without some of IKEA’s iconic Swedish meatballs. While walking through the market hall, you end up buying a bunch of stuff you convince yourself you’re going to need. Lugging your finds to your living quarters, however, you realize you forgot to pick up the chair. So you go back — and history repeats itself. 

Rewatch The Goonies 

After scrolling through a screen for hours, you realize you can’t stand to do that for another second and instead, decide to stare at it for an hour and a half, as you rewatch — possibly the greatest adventure film of all time — The Goonies. You swoon over how cute Sean Astin used to be as a kid and horrified, ponder how problematic this movie actually is. Maybe Mikey’s random, yet well-timed epiphanies will teach you how to achieve a few of your own during your final. 

Try to study

Having wasted most of your time during the week leading up to your exam, you decide to actually sit down and study. You obviously can’t do that without having a meticulously outlined study plan. You decide to start a bullet journal just to keep track of all the work you need to do. This will take hours. But I guess you’ll eventually get started? 

X marks the spot 

In a haze and walking in the dark, you somehow reach an elevator. You enter the cab only to find one single button on the panel, marked with an X. You press the button, the doors close and you quickly descend. Once the doors open again, you’re greeted with a great hall adorned with golden shelves packed with books. You explore the hall and find out it holds ancient wisdom that will help you pass your final. This is when you’re rudely awoken with a paw to the face. There is no great hall of wisdom. There’s only you, your bored cat, your dead laptop and the drool all over your notes. 

May you have received some modicum of wisdom through the traditional mode of osmosis as you laid your head on top of your notes for a nap.

This article is part of our humour section.